Failing at time management, fifteen minutes at a time.

 I think one of the biggest things I learned from this project was how much time and energy reading, writing, etc. take, and how much I can afford to devote to it per day. (You'd think, after getting two English degrees, I'd have it figured out.) One post about ten or so pages of literature was fine. There were days that I had to rush/skim a little, but I could usually go back and reread by the end of the week. But as I started to add more and more stuff on it got to be too much. At the peak, my schedule looked something like this:

Monday: 15 Minute Classics, Weekly Reflection
Tuesday: 15 Minute Classics, guest post on my wife's blog
Wednesday: 15 Minute Classics, Casually Completing Classics
Thursday: 15 Minute Classics, crits/submission for writing workshop
Friday: 15 Minute Classics, Star Wars Classics
Saturday: 15 Minute Classics
Sunday: 15 Minute Classics, guest post.

That meant that Saturday was the only day I wasn't locked into two posts (or other writing responsibilities) on the schedule (and something extra often came up). More often than not, it meant I tried to cram a ton of fiction writing in on Saturdays (since I couldn't actually produce a reasonable amount for workshop just on Thursday) and wound up burnt out. Obviously, anyone reading saw what happened. Things dropped off little by little, until I was down to basically just the core 15 Minute Classics posts. I snuck in other stuff to try to make it up here and there, but by December I think I was close to 30 posts in the hole across all the series. I am proud that I never had to miss a day on the core series. I think keeping up a daily post on just about anything is a fair accomplishment, let alone having to also read 10 or 15 pages for it. I'm mostly caught up now (I'm about a dozen books behind on Star Wars Classics, but some of them will be grouped under a single post and  I don't know that I'm going to "make them up" or just start posting and leave a little backlog.) This year, I'm going to try to shoot for one post a day, more or less, across my various projects. I want to devote a lot more time to my fiction. I was kind of burnt out after my Masters, so it was good to take a break, but I'd like to work my way up to doing fiction roughly every other day, with the other stuff filling in the rest of the days. No firm schedule yet, I'm just taking some time to enjoy finishing out this project and I'll figure it out later this month.