Time Management Tuesday: Set Aside Times

My May Days group started work today. This is a Facebook group whose members encourage each other to write during the month of May. I've been looking forward to this all year. In fact, prepping for May Days was one of my objectives for this year. I only managed to get five chapters blueprinted, so my goal for this month is to write those five chapters, which, added to what I've completed, will give me twelve completed first draft chapters.

Set Aside Time

I think of units of time like May Days and National Novel Writing Month as "set aside times." It's time we set aside for specific tasks. Back in 2012 I said of set aside times:

"What we might be talking about with this kind of set aside scheduling is binge writing, a term I hadn't heard for years until someone on Facebook linked to some interviews on it just last week. Author Sally Bosco interviewed self-described binge writers Emily Asad and Leslie Davis Guccione. Note that both authors are not binge writers in the sense that they are moved by a muse to write like crazy. They prep for their intensive writing periods."

I'm definitely binge writing this month, on one specific project that I've prepared for for months. I can't take off on any spontaneous writing tangents. Maintain some impulse control, Gail.

Reality

Forget about the actual writing. Setting aside this much time for one particular project is extremely difficult. Today is the first day of this project, and except for some reading of and tinkering with early chapters I didn't do a thing, because I had family members here for lunch. I knew this was coming up and thought, Well, I'll start working on Monday, the day before. Nope. Had another family member here yesterday. Then last week an appointment came up for tomorrow. I almost had to take an elderly family member to the dentist the week after next, but, thankfully, that fell through. Now there's talk of some of us driving to another state in a couple of weeks to pick up still another family member.

Note that I don't have young children or even older ones living here. I don't have a day job. And, yet, look what happens to my time, over and over again.

Dealing with family is a whole different management issue when you're trying to set aside big chunks of time for projects.