I may have found the solution to my “getting things done” issue, and it came about because of my tea habit.

I’ve already found that I get more writing done when that’s the first thing I do when I get to my office in the morning. I leave Scrivener up on the screen when I put the laptop to sleep at night, and I don’t do anything else on the computer until I’ve written for about an hour. I was trying to do the same thing for after lunch, starting the afternoon with writing.

Except, I like to have tea while I’m writing. I do that in the morning because I just bring my last cup of tea from breakfast upstairs with me. Strangely, I feel weird about having my afternoon tea right after lunch. So I find that I just kind of goof around until it’s an appropriate tea time, and then I get to writing.

It occurred to me last week that I could use that time to do the admin stuff. Just because I start the day with writing, it doesn’t mean I have to do the same thing after lunch. My “get started before doing anything else” thing in the afternoon can be admin and promo work.

It hasn’t been a full week yet, and I’ve already powered through a bunch of stuff that’s been sitting on my to-do list for literally months. I get a slight mental gear shift from breaking for lunch, and I’m finishing the workday at about the same time because I’m putting a work task where time wasting would usually go. Then I get back to writing at about the same time I usually would start it.

This sounds kind of like a “duh,” but I had it in my head that I needed to be writing at that time, and for some weird reason that kept me from doing anything else until I’d hit my writing quota. We’ll see how the habit holds up. And we’ll see if actually doing all these little tasks makes any difference. I’m doing stuff like updating the older e-books to add new releases to the “also by” list so people will know there are more books in the series and in some cases even new series.

The new habit is that I leave open whatever software I need for my admin tasks when I put the laptop to sleep before lunch, or I go to the website I need, so there won’t be any temptation to do anything else before I get through that day’s to-do list items.