What day is today? I never seem to know anymore. Yesterday, I didn’t realize it was Friday until 8 pm. Like the trendy meme says, “I wish days of the week underwear were still a thing.” If they were, I might have a fighting chance. My life is a jumble of agendas, must-dos, obligations, and deadlines. My calendar dictates my activities, but even with careful planning, my world lacks structure.

Working from home, I no longer endure my everyday commute or notice the signposts separating my workdays from the weekend. My typical day job routine starts earlier and ends later than when I worked in an office. This difference results from shifting evening family duties into previously verboten work hours. Without clear delineation, business hours leak into the entire week. Experts tell us increased screen time messes with our internal clocks. Between computer for the day job, Zoom calls, smartphones, games, and streaming my favorite shows, I find myself forever sucked into the evil blue light. I bet the reduced winter daylight and my general anxiety are contributing to my nighttime insomnia. Is it any wonder my biggest daily challenge is dragging my butt out of bed in the morning?

As crazy as it might sound, the answer is more organization. Those silly experts say set routines, provide clues and markers to distinguish Friday from Sunday. In the Pre-Industrial Revolution society, women adhered to the “Wash on Monday, Iron on Tuesday” arrangement. Maybe it helped them distinguish the days of the week more easily. An assigned task for each weekday was common enough to appear in nursery rhymes and folk songs. There is comfort in knowing what is expected on each specific day, though I plan to update the poem to suit my needs more accurately. I propose to write essays on Monday, short stories on Tuesday, and maybe flash fiction on Wednesday?

Do you have specific days for certain tasks?

_________________________________________

Keep on writing.

Jo Hawk The Writer

I have a love-hate relationship with deadlines. Deadlines are easy to despise. I bet you can list dozens of reasons you detest them without breaking a sweat. I was not a fan until I understood the secret powers inherent in well-crafted, targeted completion dates. Now I am a convert, and I am becoming a firm believer in tight deadlines.

Call me crazy, but seeing a finish line and a checkered flag gets me moving. It’s even better when I combine an element of competition. Who doesn’t enjoy bragging rights and the thrill of winning? Setting clear, defined objectives with milestones and endings is exciting and provides a source of inspiration, ideas, and possibilities. It gives me purpose. My personal goals up the ante for my motivation. These are the promises I make to myself and seldom share with anyone else. They rise to the top of my priority list, and I work diligently to meet those drop-dead dates. Who wants to look in the mirror and admit failure? Not me.

Success does not come without a cost. I can’t commit to every opportunity. Choosing one activity often means I must say no to others. It’s painful in the short term. I would love to binge-watch the latest Netflix release, but it doesn’t feed my sense of accomplishment. It only creates nasty feelings of guilt. Winning, finishing early, is a reward that keeps on giving. I celebrate a job well done, and my accomplishment fuels my desire to start the next project.

The absolute best aspect of deadlines is they give me a specific place to stop. Time’s up, step away from your keyboard. As a perfectionist, I could tweak, rearrange, adjust, and spend hours running down fascinating rabbit holes with nothing to show for it. Deadlines force me to release insignificant minutia and focus on the key elements. They compel me to decide and move on.

But every well-conceived deadline needs a buffer for the unexpected. You never know when you might be sidelined by a fever and head lice.

Do you work with deadlines?

_________________________________________

Keep on writing.

Jo Hawk The Writer

The problem with beautiful falling snow is the need to shovel it from sidewalks, driveways, and car windshields. It is one winter task I relish, especially when I can complete the work in nighttime silence. I tried, stayed up late in hopeful anticipation, but when I fell asleep in the morning’s small hours, it was still snowing.

The alarm slowly penetrated my hazy dreams. With reluctance, I let them slip from my mind to meet the cold, bright morning. Frigid might be a better word since my thermometer read a whopping sixteen degrees as I pulled on a hat, jacket, gloves, and sunglasses to start my day. A little voice told me to dig out my time-tested Icelandic wool coat, and I paid for my laziness with bone-cracking chills for the duration of the required work hours.

All was not lost. A steamy hot pot of Good Hope Vanilla tea, a warm vanilla sugar cookie, a cozy fire, a thick blanket, and a short restorative nap was all I needed to set the world right again. Bitter winter weather spurs me to act, often for self-preservation reasons. Freezing conditions demand forethought, action, and contingencies to account for the worst-case scenarios to preserve life. Writing may not hold such dire personal consequences. But inside me, a glowing ember of desire burns, driving me to produce stories when there are few distractions and an atmosphere enhanced by inspiring vanilla winter waves.

Do you prefer writing in the summer or the winter?

_________________________________________

Keep on writing.

Jo Hawk The Writer

In my periphery, just outside my window, something floated and swirled while I focused, concentrating on my screen. It moved again. Annoyed by the unexpected distraction, I glanced from my document to a scene grounded in reality and not the fantasy in my head. Small and white, barely visible against the backdrop of last week’s accumulation, snow flurries drifted. They appeared as almost imperceptible bits of fluff, but a few tiny dancing snowflakes never amount to anything. I dismissed them and returned to my task. Several hours later, I discovered a very different world. Those insignificant flakes were unrelenting in their objective to cover every bit of previously plowed, shoveled, scraped, and cleared surface. My weather app confirmed total snowfall of one to two inches.

The never-ending house remodeling project creeps along at a snail’s pace. I face the constant challenge of delayed components, contractor’s schedules, back-ordered items, and extended lead times because of the pandemic. Progress seems glacial. Yesterday a friend stopped by, and she expressed complete amazement with the improvements and the number of projects completed since the last time she was here.

I am not a patient person. I enjoy digging in, getting work done, and reveling in the finished piece for a hot minute before moving to the next item on my list. To say my daily recorded word counts have been disappointing would be a gross understatement. I have much bigger goals in mind. Three to four hundred words a day sounds paltry when you compare them to the thousands some authors claim to write. But those two previous incidents made me curious, and when I checked my spreadsheet, I discovered a total of 8,000 written words so far this year. If I maintain this rate, I will log 150,000 words by year’s end.

What small steps, taken today, will accumulate and change your world?

_________________________________________

Keep on writing.

Jo Hawk The Writer

 

When does the future begin? A popular theory says “right now” is three seconds long. So does it start in four seconds or next year? Studies by Hal Hershfield at UCLA and Sam Maglio at the University of Toronto conclude the answer depends on you and how connected you are to your future self. Individual perceptions of when the present ends varied from “right now” to a year from now.  Those perceived time frames influenced current choices and, by extension, held a significant impact on their futures. While individual perceived timeframes tend to remain stable, external factors can change them.

The research suggests that the closer we imagine the future to begin, the more compelled we are to act. Counting time in days versus months or years changes your context. Ninety days feel closer than three months or the first quarter. The future events importance, a wedding, graduation, saving for retirement, planning a trip, do not matter as much as how we interpret the time-matrix. People who thought of their retirement beginning in 10,950 days instead of 30 years started saving four times sooner. Thinking of an event in days made the future feel closer and connected to today.

The more future self-continuity you feel, the more likely you will decide to take action today to affect your future self. By now, most New Year Resolutions have disappeared in the mist. I wonder if we would experience improved results if our resolutions lasted for a month or a day?

How connected are you to your future?

_________________________________________

Keep on writing.

Jo Hawk The Writer