A change in the Calendar of Goal Tracking letter lineup.

Okay, I guess it’s nearly 21 months that I’ve been working on my ‘calendar of goal tracking’ productivity trick. 🙂 Over that time, I’ve added a few new letters, and one multiple-letter code, to record new activities that I’ve been time-slicing, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever completely redefined a letter, until now.

Ever since the ‘Team Ambitious’ critique program started up, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on critiques for my Odyssey friends, and learning a lot from them. However, I think I’ve noticed that I’ve been spending less time and effort on drafting and revising my own pieces because of this, and that really does need to change. One of the places to get that change started, I think, is on the calendar. Somewhere along the way, I told myself that working on somebody’s critique was enough to get me an ‘E’ for the day. That stops as of yesterday. E is only for editing my own stuff, just like W is only for doing my own writing, and so on.

But I wanted to keep tracking the Team Ambitious critiquing stuff, and I fussed over what letter to use. T is already in use for the Thinking Sideways course, and A is for my Art exercises, so I couldn’t use either of them, and trying to use them both together could be really confusing. C is for Cleaning, and so on.

But I’ve made a decision. O was originally for Outlining new story ideas, but I’ve never really used that much, (even though I have some outlining to do soon on the Steampunk Roswell/Area 51 idea!) As of yesterday, O stands for Odyssey stuff instead.

And hopefully that’ll mean a few more Ws on the calendar, and some E’s that actually mean my stories are closer to getting submitted!

The Surprising power of Time Slices

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?