Crunch time: To crunch or not to crunch

With just over a week left of Camp NaNoWriMo, I've realized that while my novel-first-thing plan has worked well for the days I work from home, I've had enough days where I don't that I'm fairly behind at this point.  I will have to do two hours of revision work -- instead of one -- for all except a few days of the rest of July in order to "win."

One step at a time

I've been thinking a lot about how to change one's habits.  I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about a few changes I was making to my time management plan, such as working on my novel first each day and doing financials every Monday.

So far it's working fairly well, on days that I work from home anyway.  When I have to wake up and go to a job somewhere there's no way I'll get up early enough to get anything else done beforehand, and the weekends are so busy and just plain different in how I schedule things that it doesn't work then either.

Unfortunately, that can prove a problem at times.  For instance, last week I had a very busy week where I didn't work from home during the day all that much.  As a result, Monday was my only day all week where my plan actually worked.  This week will be easier, luckily, since I'm working from home half the week instead of just one day.

My new plan has me thinking a little more about how habits are actually changed.  I've always made these grandiose posts about changing my habits, and inevitably nothing really happens.  Yet without even thinking about it, I've been changing my habits in some other areas of my life without even really thinking about it.  Why is that working, and my efforts at better time management as a freelancer never succeed?

Unexpected expenses

Perhaps the biggest truth about freelancing is that you can't always anticipate your income.  Well, neither can you always anticipate your expenses... especially when your livelihood depends on a fickle thing called a computer.

Thursday night (okay, early Friday morning) when I went to bed, my computer was working just fine.  Friday morning (err, afternoon) when I tried booting up again, the keyboard suddenly didn't work.

Yes, I killed another keyboard.  This seems to be a theme for me.  Apparently being typed on all day is hard on them.

Anyway, this is the second time I've killed a keyboard on my beloved Sony Vaio, which I have had for four years now.  The first time I wore out the hinges on a few of my most-used keys, like A and S and T.  This time, anytime I pressed a key, it thought I was holding it down, which locked everything else up.

Just coasting along

It has been nearly a year since I last blogged.  Rather than to tell you, "I'm back!" -- something that has been proven wrong every time I've said it -- I want to tell you about what I have been doing.

The truth is, although I've been really busy, sometimes I feel like I don't have much control over my time.  I've just been coasting along, and I want to change that.

I've made a couple of changes recently that I'm hoping will help with that goal.