I bore down last week on getting back to business and utterly failed.
I got a fair bit written, but nothing published. I’ve been re-jiggering the behind the scenes of the website, and I haven’t figured out how it’s all going to work. I really should have at least figured that part out last week, but instead, I was just really tired.
Crappy night job dropped 10% of staff hours due to the pandemic, but that disproportionately fell on the casual staff and my hours didn’t change. It was more work from the start, but customer numbers have risen to pre-pandemic levels, and they have yet to bring that staff back. It’s safe to say that I have been more tired as a result.
While there is nothing I can do about work’s rostering policy, I also let my recent tiredness lead me into stupid temptation. I downloaded a mobile game.
One of the ways that I have tried to improve over the last year is increasing my productivity. I listen to writing podcasts and audiobooks at work, I try to track my working hours to be honest with my progress, and I put Microsoft Word on my phone so that I could write anywhere. Making better use of the hours of my life has led to a marked improvement in productivity. So it’s not at all surprising how quickly that all dried up when I started playing a mind-numbing game on my phone.
For the last couple of weeks, I have dissolved among the bright lights and ringing tunes of a mobile game that is so similar to the pokies that there was even a pot luck spin every 10 minutes to keep me sucked in and playing for hours on end. I stopped playing MMO’s for this very reason if you invest so much time into the game you are not getting anything else done. Apparently, this is a lesson I have to learn multiple times.
Aside from my grumbling about not getting anything done, the recent break from writing does have a positive side. Every time I’m not writing for a while, I find myself daydreaming new stories. The past week has had Frank Mason jumping out of ships and waxing lyrical about the nature of the human mind. It remains to be seen if I can turn the rough-hewn daydreams into anything remotely readable, but it is a mechanism that I think of as anti-Resistance.
Resistance is always trying to get me to stop, and when it succeeds it itself is attacked by its own Resistance, and my mind is free to wander and play. It’s nice to be reminded every now and then that whether I write or not, my mind will be making up fantastic stories. Writing is just a way to share them around.