The Surprising power of Time Slices

January 30, 2013

Just a few short thoughts to share for today. One – about the closing of Six Sentence Sunday. First off, I have to once again give big props to all the admins over at http://www.sixsunday.com for all the work they’ve put into running such a huge ongoing blog hop for so long. I can appreciate that the job only got more stressful once they announced that it was going to be closing, and that they’re sick and tired of hearing pitches about people who want to carry on the torch and want something from them.

But – man, they closed up the shop quickly! I’d been looking forward to reading more entries from last Sunday, and sixsunday.com is locked up tight. Everything’s been taken down, the linky lists, the cover art ads, the FAQ and rules list – just one post saying that they don’t endorse any copycats – and commenting disabled on the post. It’s a little sad for me to see it end that way – would it have hurt anybody to leave the Jan 27th link list available for a full week? Sigh.

Moving on – as you may know, I’ve been doing cleaning timeslices for a long time, off and on. One of my 2013 goals was to keep up an average of 2 hours cleaning and tidying in my apartment for the whole year, and I had a good streak going from December too. So after I was done with work yesterday, I looked around the living room, decided that I should probably tackle the CD containers near the back shelves in my living room, as that was one of the few loci of mess remaining on the living room floor that doesn’t really belong there. Once the floor is actually clear, I can start working on sweeping and even washing the floor! (I’ve already been through this in the other rooms of the apartment – the living room is the last holdout.)

Then I did a bit of math on the numbers from the iPhone project tracker I’ve been using for my January cleaning timeslices and changed my mind. I was up to 9 hours and an odd minute, which was enough to declare that I was keeping up on my goal for the month – I could skate through the rest of the month and dive back into the living room stuff when February started. So I sat down at the Toshiba laptop and worked on some photo conversion stuff for the old Dell Axim handheld that I’d been wanting to get done.

After an hour of that, I figured that I’d done enough for that and needed to get another timeslice marked off on my calendar. So what do I do? Completely forgetting that I’d decided to give myself three days off cleaning, I log back into the hours tracker and spend ten minutes clearing mess off the living room floor! 😀

That’s the power of timeslices right there – when doing something that you’ve always thought of as an unpleasant chore becomes enough of a habit that you find yourself doing it even after you gave yourself a day off from it, or three. 🙂

Are you doing any timeslices lately? What’s the most unappealing project you’ve gotten through a little bit at a time?


New Year, New Goals

January 1, 2013

Happy New Year to you, friends and followers! I haven’t been that wild about the number 13 for a little while. It didn’t really start as a superstitious thing; I just started to dislike it when I began messing around with number theory and factoring; I tend to prefer numbers with lots of factors to primes, and there 13 is, not just a prime, but coming right after 12, the first number to have five different factors other than itself. 😉

But since we’re stuck with 2013 for a whole year, I’ve decided that I need to learn to love it, and part of that is my ‘Lucky 13’ goals list for the year – 13 things I want to accomplish in the year. Here’s the list:

  1. Apply for Summer workshops: Odyssey, Clarion West, Clarion, and CSSF Novels.
  2. Finish ‘How to Revise your Novel’ lessons.
  3. Submit revised “Won’t somebody think of the children” for critters.org RFDR and nanowrimo.org Feedback/Critiques forum.
  4. New novel-length revision project – get through Block Revision at least.
  5. Finish lessons 1-8 of ‘How to Think Sideways’ (given to me by my sister.)
  6. Finish working through ‘Drawing on the Right side of the brain’
  7. Read 104 short stories (2 per week)
  8. Spend 2 hours cleaning/tidying apartment every week
  9. Polish 50 chapters of completed fanfic.
  10. Complete 2 fanvideos
  11. Write 15 new short stories
  12. Do short story shrine revisions on 4 stories
  13. Start online dating

And, I’ve come up with a short list of steps I want to take in January – not definitive, as I expect I’ll also be working on things like the cleaning and short stories in every month…

  • Finish lesson 20 of ‘How to Revise your Novel’
  • Review critters feedback for ‘Gnomes’ and revise sample chapters accordingly.
  • Flesh out five-page synopsis for ‘The Gnomes are Missing’
  • Cut Block Revision draft of “The Storm Mirror” down to 6500 words.
  • Proofread “Time Bubble Trap” and submit to critters.org queue
  • Get feedback on ‘The Storm Mirror’
  • Earn a critters mpc credit
  • Finish updating 12 stories on fanfiction.net

How about you, have you got anything already on your to-do list for 2013?


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