Daily Routine, Part 1

On Wednesday, my friend Nils pointed me to Daily Routines, a blog about "How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days."

He ended his email by asking, "What's yours...?"

When D and I decided to take the next two years off to become writers, we also decided to treat our writing as real work. That meant coming up with--and sticking to--some kind of schedule, so we'd be disciplined and actually Get Things Done. We're still tweaking our routine, but here's the current blueprint:

We take turns being "the boss" each week. This week, I'm the boss, so I got to pick our days off. Our defaults are to take Wednesday and Saturday off, and run errands on Tuesday if necessary. Most other days we don't need to leave the house, and sometimes we don't even change out of our pajamas. (What can I say? We've come to terms with our laziness.)

Unless we have somewhere to be, we tend to roll out of bed between 10 and 11 AM. The first thing we do is take a Body Test on Wii Fit, and do some exercises if we feel like it.

After breakfast (usually oatmeal or cereal and coffee or tea), we spend 2-3 hours writing. Then lunch (usually sandwiches), then another 2-3 hours of writing. When one of us gets hungry, we start making dinner (answers may vary), then watch TV or a movie while we eat. After that it's back to writing until bedtime.

Of course, since we have no other ongoing commitments at the moment, this schedule is infinitely malleable. (That will change once we start volunteering, to get ourselves out of the house and maintain human contact.) For example, sometimes we take an hour off in the afternoon to play Rock Band, and this week, instead of the third writing shift, we've been organizing our photos from the road trip.

More details on the actual writing in Part 2, coming soon...

~CKL