Too Long; Or, Setting the Right Kind of Deadlines

Somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, I found myself overwhelmed by everything. I had a 7 month-old who was very attached, a 6 year-old who has never had a normal year of school suddenly being ripped from Kindergarten and homeschooled, a full-time position at work that was demanding more and more of my time and attention when I had less and less to spare. My baby had pooped on me during a meeting I was running; everyone had a good laugh because hahaha babies are so cute at that age! Meanwhile, I was humiliated and feeling dejected. My writing, which I had been spending my free time working on, was sidelined again and again and again. My moments of inspiration were fewer and farther between and I became dependent on timelines and outlines I had written months prior, a reservoir quickly running dry. I broke down and did what so many other women have had to do to survive this pandemic: I walked away from a job I had been working 3 years to get to take care of my children.

Let me first say, my husband was a champ through this. He still worked full time, but we were now very dependent on his income alone, as my quitting effectively cut our total income in half. I’m so grateful for him being supportive of my leaving my job, even though it was a big inconvenience to him (and our savings account). He’s always been very supportive of my writing, so when I informed him I would try to focus during this time off to write in my downtime he continued to cheer me on.

Suddenly, with the weight of my job responsibilities off my plate, I set to writing. At first, I was very successful, dropping large sections in my main story and a couple of other projects I have pestering for my coveted ‘on deck’ spot. After a few weeks of phenomenal progress, I found myself in almost the exact same predicament I was in before; this time, the pressure was self-inflicted. I had set word count goals, section completion goals, outline goals, chapter review goals…suddenly, the bucket hit the bottom of an empty well and I…well, I panicked.

Fast forward to now. I’ve been out of work for 8 months. My needy baby is now a silly 14 month-old, my 7 year-old first-grader has returned to in-person learning (4 days a week, mind you), and my limited applications for at-home part time work are either fruitless or netting me silence. My husband and I have signed up to get our vaccines (which have opened up in the state I live in for anyone 16 and up) and our student loans COVID-forbearances are expiring. I will have to return to the workforce, whether I like it or not. Depending on what kind of job I can get, I may need to put my daughter into daycare, guaranteeing I will need additional income to cover that as well. It’s overwhelming, all over again.

And all the while, all I want to do is write guilt-free.

Because, at the end of the day, some of my major hold-ups are my feelings of guilt; sacrificing what will make my family more comfortable to let me try to live something I have dreamed about since I was a kid. How am I going to keep from self-sabotaging myself, work toward my dream, but not put my family at risk?

I had a breakthrough (read: breakdown) yesterday when I was being particularly honest with my husband and a friend of mine about what I was struggling with when I realized I could actually have both. My student loan company does forbearance in two month intervals; why not set a two month deadline with scheduled intervals to write? Worst-case scenario, I’m not worse off than where I am and, at the very best, I have a novel finished and ready for readers or even agent hunting. I’ve also made the very difficult decision to trunk the novel I have been slowly working on for years; I needed to shed myself of that guilt and focus instead on the story that is screaming for attention. Once I made that decision, I have been able to get more writing done in the last two weeks than I have in the previous 4 months.

All of this required me to change my perspective when it came to setting goals. Now, I try to run myself through the following:

1. Do you have a fixed time limit that something must be completed by? Are you running out of free time/vacation time/ time off?
   • Good time management is always something people struggle with, especially those people who find themselves performing better when the pressure is on. Be aware of time constraints and try to work within your own methodology to maximize the time with which you have to work.
     • Example: I know my daughter’s nap is only about 2-2.5 hours in the afternoon, so I make sure to get all my writing done during that time; that way, I’m not taking time away from my daughter and I’m still giving myself time to cook, clean and work on the household guilt-free.
2. Is the word count arbitrary or contractually required?
   • Do you have to produce 500 word-count blurbs for a project? Are you trying to finish NaNoWriMo and you just want to hit the 50k word count? Are you just trying to be consistent with writing 3,000 words a day? If the goals are personal goals, decide if you are trying to increase your current word count or maintain consistency.
     • One thing I think works well is to front load the word count at the beginning of a week and scale down as the week progresses. If you have, say, a 10,000 word count goal for a week, you could do 2,000 a day Monday through Friday, or you could do 4,000 the first day, 3,000 the next, 2,000 the next, 1,000 the fourth, leaving the last day for edits, revisions, or outlining for the next week! This maximizes the energy from the first day back from your (hopefully) restful weekend and gives you time to prepare for the next week to keep up momentum.
     • Example: I’m pretty lucky if I can nail 2,000 words during my daughter’s nap in the afternoon. That time, however, is not consistent and things always pop up during her naps that can shorten the time or leave me with less to work with. I know I struggle with word count goals so I don’t do them anymore. Instead, I use any amount of words written as an indicator that I’m sticking to my write every day goal instead.
3. Are the goals you have or are setting reasonable for you? Are these goals you are setting for yourself or are they mandated by someone else?
   • If these are milestones or goals that are set by a project or work requirement, make sure you are working with your manager/team to identify if the goals are reasonable. Communication within a team can be a huge boon when trying to recalibrate work loads and identifying gaps in process.
   • If this is a personal goal, is your goal created by you or by external pressures? Why are you choosing these goals, and what do they say about the work your doing, the project you are on, or the kind of worker that you are? Be honest with yourself; it is the only way to prevent burnout of the self-inflicted kind.
     • Example: I was setting a bunch of weird, arbitrary word count goals for sections/chapters in the novel I was working on. This led me to do a bunch of writing that I didn’t enjoy, like extending dialog when it should have naturally ended earlier or working on sections that needed time to set a while. What I should have been doing was writing what was interesting to me, since that is the best motivation for me to continue my work.

Well, the baby has discovered that Mama has slipped away to sneak and write again. Wishing you all reading the very best!

-V. Raylean