Does the word ‘schedule’ make you anxious?
It does for me.
Summer is coming to a close, and fall will soon begin. Many will be returning back to school, and lazy summer days will soon turned to scheduled ones. (Maybe even hyper-scheduled ones.) For me, this time of year means that I’m ramping up for tutoring at our Classical Conversations homeschool group, attending a Bible study once a week, and shuttling my son to his weekly violin lessons.
I’m going to miss those easy summer days.
I spent a lot of those days working on my manuscript, editing and revising the pages, working and re-working the words. I spent a lot of those days taking my kids to the park on the spur-of-the-moment. I spent a lot of those days traveling on family road trips.
Sigh… I’m going to miss the summer.
My summer also came with some sadness. A good friend passed away. She was a young mom, and we connected a lot during her last weeks. My heart is heavy writing those words. Good things happened too. One of them being I got a renewed perspective on my writing career.
I don’t want fall to arrive only to lose sight of all these things (the sad and the joyful, the creative and the playful). So I’ve purposed to reset my priorities for the fall. The two main activities I need to focus on are:
- Writing
- Homeschooling
This is the season I’m in, a writer-mama season. I need to fully embrace it and focus on it. So I plan to step away from my weekly, outside Bible study to free up some of my hours. I have regular quiet times at home, so I won’t be losing fellowship with Him. I also won’t be signing up my children for library story times. They were good when my children were younger, but now I have a structured curriculum to get through. I don’t want to slough off their learning. So I’ll only be leaving the house once a week during the day for Classical Conversations and one evening a week for the five year old’s violin lessons.
As for my writing, I believe my time spent NOT driving around town from one activity to the next will enable me to focus on my work. For the way I write (fast drafter, slow editor), I need QUANTITY TIME to process and think and tinker with my writing. I don’t get that time if I’m engaged in other things. If I can set aside a specific number of hours each day to do this, I’ll be content. Sometimes people ask why I write. The real answer? I enjoy it. It’s not always exciting (especially when my brain isn’t working, lol), but at the end of the day being creative makes me happy.
With those goals in mind, this is on my list of things to do in September:
- Figure out a realistic writing schedule
- Figure out a realistic homeschooling schedule (We should have short teaching days since my children are small.)
- Learn to systematize my writing with Scrivener. (I’m tinkering with the trial software right now. Hopefully, this will be a good tool for me to work with.)
- Set up a weekly routine so that I can take care of home stuff, writing stuff, homeschooling stuff and marketing stuff. (It’ll be something like Sundays are dedicated to marketing, etc.)
- Revisit the career goals I wrote last year and see what worked, what didn’t, an what needs to be updated.
Oh and I’m doing another thing differently too. We’ll be having a topic for the month. This month’s topic will focus on business planning for writers and other creative types. So check back in next Monday when we’ll discuss developing a purpose and vision for your creative career. (And if you don’t think you’re creative…well, that’s baloney. We’re all creative so join in the conversation!)
Question for You: Does the onset of fall make you anxious or happy and why?
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