Just start

I have been completely unable to settle into any kind of writing and working routine at all. Every day it's just scroll, scroll, scroll. The scrolling is so bad ... the constancy of pretending to yourself you're going somewhere, but know that you're going nowhere. I'm desperate for intellectual engagement with someone else's intellect. Writers are sort of in a position to do that for themselves by creating a draft and then working on it, pushing it to be better, questioning your own ideas. But I don't have anything at that stage of development, and I'm struggling even more than I have before to find the momentum for getting started.

So this morning, I've taken out my passion planner (I hate its name, but love its layout), and I've done what all the productivity people tell you to do--write down what needs to be done, then put it into your diary against a time. Make an appointment with yourself, and then turn up to that appointment.

I've got blogging in there every morning for the next week at 8.30 am. It's not 8.30 now, it's 10.30. But when I looked at my diary I decided that instead of waiting to begin on Monday, or frittering away today and beginning tomorrow, it was more in the spirit of it to start today even if a few hours have already passed.

While writing, I've been distracted by one email that came in, a ridiculous email I should have deleted straight away, trying to convince me I should be using G Suite or Microsoft for my emails instead of cpanel. See how ridiculous it was? As if that makes any difference at all to me or my life. And yet, I read the email and started looking at the little table that had so few ticks next to cpanel and so many next to G Suite and Microsoft.

But I've set the productivity app on my phone, and the red screen and the counting down clock got my attention again, and I deleted the email and came back to this tab. It seems so pathetic that I have to resort to this app so often. Why not just sit and work when it is so much more rewarding than scrolling, scrolling, scrolling?

All right, well I've still got 14 minutes in this allocated space of time, so I'm going to finish here, check in with the blogs on my blogroll and then it's on to the next block of time. If you're interested, I'll be back tomorrow at 8.30 am (according to my diary)

The End. Or is it?