You ever get mad at yourself because something that should work actually does work, so you’re mad at yourself that you put off doing it for so long. That was me this month with using sprints and giving myself concrete writing goals. I used to do this religiously, but recently, I fell off the wagon due to life, work, stress, etc. I told myself that I didn’t need to have goals because I can just write and that’s fine.
*Narrator voice* It was indeed not fine.
I started to get very down about myself because I was struggling to write consistently above a small(ish) amount per day with plenty of work days where I did nothing at all. This led to me feeling bad about myself and internally beating myself up. As you can imagine, this is counterproductive and only makes it harder to write. Not writing makes my mental health slip and my mental health slipping makes me not want to write. It can be a vicious cycle at times. Part of what was making it hard to write and stay on track was I was focusing on a minimum while trying to shoot for a maximum that was unattainable because in my head I was always playing catch-up. “My goal is x, but as long as I shoot for y, I’m okay.” This led to me hitting the smaller goal and feeling bad that I didn’t hit the bigger one. Playing catch-up constantly is stressful as hell, and when you can’t catch up because the goal was unrealistic, it makes everything worse.
In November, I vowed to not do that. I took out my blank word count tracker, set up a monthly goal that was reasonable enough for daily writing where if I missed a day, fully or partially, I could catch up in a day or two. So far, it has been working, and I’m mad at myself for not doing it sooner last month. I wish I had taken a second, regrouped, and restarted my word count goal midway through. My absolute refusal to recalibrate was my downfall, and I’m trying to be better about it because my autistic brain does not like to change or deviate from a plan once I have it in place.
If you’re curious as to what I am using right now to track all of this, I would like to warn you that I have redundancies because I’m still figuring out what my brain prefers at this point. I have a monthly sprints tracker from Sarra Cannon’s Heartbreathing resource library that I’m using to specifically track sprints each day as well as my word count. To track my overall writing goal until I finish, I’m using Pacemaker (which lowkey stresses me out a little, so I haven’t been using it as consistently), but for my monthly goal, I’m trying out TrackBear because a friend was recommending it. It’s similar to Nanowrimo’s graphs, which I think a lot of people will like. I find it less stressful to look at than Pacemaker right now. I have no idea why, but if it works, it works.
Sprinting has also helped a lot when I’m feeling resistance about writing because it is a concise amount of time that I need to work, and after that, I can be done. Often by the time I finish, I’m less stressed and can easily keep writing. I bought a timer cube to help with this as well because I had a bad habit of pausing internet-based timers. I really hate the fact that I need to work around my brain so much, but I’m trying to be kind to myself because the outside world in the US is very stressful and feeling out of control makes my anxiety so much worse.
The lesson I would like you to take away from this that took me too long to figure out is that if something isn’t working, stop and take a step back. Figure out what you need to do to regroup, be realistic with what you are capable of, and start over. You can get back on track. You just need to be flexible and allow yourself to do so.
Kara Jorgensen 