day something or other

Day one of waking up at 5 am was a bust.  Sure, I woke up at 5 am, but I woke up and had to immediately leave for work.  I guess that’s better than nothing. 

So, I got rid of Firefox and installed Chrome.  Chrome has a program add-on called Stay Focused.  Stay Focused has something called “the nuclear option”.  Under the nuclear option, it doesn't allow access to any website for a certain period of time.  I suppose this could be a bad thing, but the purpose of waking up this early is to spend time in learning and production.  You can’t spend time learning if you are constantly surfing the net for junk and cat pictures. 

I guess it all seems relevant at the time, but in the end it’s just a method to delay action.  I don’t want to delay action.  I want to produce something as opposed to just consume.  I’ve had that feeling before, when all I wanted to do was produce, produce, produce.    It was an excellent feeling, and I want to get it back. 

I guess part of the purpose of designing this system is to get some of the feeling out of this, though.  Sure, feelings are great but in reality you need to produce regardless of what you feel.  Timelines need to be met, and things have to get done.  You can’t wait on your feelings to get to work, or you will get fired.  Or you will get beat to market.  Or you’ll just lose.  And that is not what I want to happen. 

Hence the nuclear option.  Any research that needs to be done for this blog or anything else I produce has to be done and finished by the time I get up this morning.  Between 5 AM and 7 AM, my computer won’t let me go surfing the internet.  And I have to admit… that “shouldn't you be working?” message is fairly effective.  Simple, elegant, and basic.  It works perfectly to get your brain out of the wandering gear and back to the producing gear.

So here it is, not even 5:20 in the morning, and I've already produced greater than 300 words and the blog is done for the day.  I guess the only side effect to all of this is I will have to set up and schedule this post later today.  But that is a side effect I’m willing to take. 

I guess the point of Stay Focused is to give more power to something other than willpower.  Willpower alone doesn't seem to ever get me very far.  It works much better to have something that provides autopilot willpower.  Maybe autopilot discipline?  I don’t know.  Anyways, as for the first day…  I’m happy with the results.

Side note: I looked at my document on how long it has been since I worked on Causality Crimes, and it has been 22 days.  Before that, it was 20 days.  Before that, 24.  As you can see, the results of what I was trying to do previously show fairly obviously.  Even though you only have to write 300 words per day to reach 100,000 words, I was only writing once every three weeks.  That isn't even enough time to think about the story and get the thing moving.  

If you are only touching something every three weeks, then you have no idea where to even start.  Another good reason to follow this plan.  It will take five days to get the average period between writing under ten days.  That looks to be my goal for the moment.  Get it under ten days, at 300 words per day.  That is how you succeed.  Show up every day, and make effort every single day.