Summer Productivity
Before school wrapped in the spring I’d started another ebook to sell on Amazon. Each one feels slightly better than the next and this one felt especially good. It was part biography, part productivity, part philosophy, part self-improvement. Actually, it still is. I finished the first draft when my kids spent a week a summer camp. Since then it’s stagnated.
I’ve tried to work on it, slipping into the file for moments and minutes but progressed little. In fact, I might have done negative work, taking a decent outline to something garbled. I’ll find out this fall. When my kids are back in school.
Writing large pieces is harder for me in the summer. Blog posts have been kind of hard. Reading has been easy, though happens less. That’s the summer system.
It’s not just summers that are like this either. We all go through seasons of the year and seasons of our lives. On one summer trip we saw my brother who has a one and a three year old. That’s time-intensive parenting. The kids need watched (or is it guarded?) all the time. The contrast was especially stark because my eleven and nine year old daughters helped with the watching. The season of life with young kids makes some types of work hard. It’s why almost no one works from home at that age, as the work at home never ends. The Writing Routines interview with Asha Dornfest tells this story well.
“In 2005, I had a 6 year-old and a 1 year-old, so the rhythm of my day was completely different from now (my kids are 18 and 14!). For all these years, I have tucked my work into the spaces between family needs. Some years, those spaces were tiny (nap times, preschool, late at night), and other years the spaces were bigger. My husband, Rael, actually took time off while I wrote books so I could devote my time and attention to those projects.”
All our work takes time but not all our time is evenly distributed; in an hour, a day, a week, a year, or even a life.