It’s been two years since I stopped freelance writing and started my crappy (but reliable) night job. In that time I have accrued eight weeks of annual leave but only taken one of them, which I spent moving house. This week I am taking another week of annual leave, but this time I get to spend it writing. My plan for the week is to pretend that I have quit crappy night job to write full time. I guess I’m having a fantasy vacation.
I have made a list of all the jobs I want to get done, and I’m estimating my list is about 42 hours of work. It’s not all creative, there’s plenty of analytical or editing work in the mix, as I don’t think I could do 41 hours of creative work in a week; at least, not at this point in my career.
I also want to focus on balancing my life outside of work. Exercise, diet, sleep, cleaning the house, and socialising are all on the agenda. I find fad diets to be a waste of time; for a diet to work, at least for me, it must be a permanent change. I have been limiting my portion size for a while, and I’ve lost 5kg in the last six months. It could be faster, but I’m pretty happy with it, so I am not going to make a change to my diet.
This week I am living during the day, the first couple of nights over the weekend were pretty rough as I changed my sleeping pattern, but if there’s one thing that working nights will do for you, it makes you resistant to tiredness (not to feeling it, but to it irritating you). I slept a full seven hours last night, which is what I find works for me, so far so good.
There are cleaning jobs I plan to do this week, and I figure I’ll use them as breaks between writing work and see how it goes. The advantage of being awake during the day is that I can vacuum without waking anyone up! Hahaha! (Maniacally at first turning into the sad Joaquin Phoenix Joker laugh)
Socialising is something I have to work on, I’m more of an introverted guy and quite happy to be on my own. On the other hand, too much time on my own will make me madder than I already am. I’ll make more of an effort this week than I normally do, but I’m not going to be too upset if there isn’t much movement.
Finally, and I have left it last for a reason, exercise. If I really was writing full time, then this is something I need to get right. If I spend the entire day never more than 20 steps from my desk, my diet would need to be about three carrot sticks for the week. I struggle to hit 10,000 steps per day normally (according to my pedometer I normally do between 5-7 thousand steps at work and I rarely do extra steps at home). This is something I would like to be much better at. 10,000 steps per day is supposed to be the minimum you should do for good cardiac health, and I figure I’ll write a lot less if I keel over. I plan to do a 5,000 step walk each morning, then another in the evening. When I go back to work I’d like to try keeping the walk when I get up. It normally takes me ages to wake up and not feel rubbish, so a walk may not necessarily make me feel better, but it will make it so I hit my step target and it will keep me away from people when I am at my most irritable.
Well, this post was one of my jobs done for the week. Time to start the next one.