You can’t do it all.
Some mothers hear this and feel reassured, others defeated. As an indie author mom, I’d say it falls on the defeated side most days. When you self-publish, if feels like you have to do it all: write, market, organize, tweet, Facebook, Instagram… Add to that keeping tiny humans alive, and you hang your head and admit, sadly, no, I can’t do it all.
But I can still get a heck of a lot done.
How? By tracking my time. By knowing how long things actually take me, not how long I hope they’ll take, or how long they should take me.
Bedtime is an excellent example. In our house, it should take roughly an hour – by 6:30 we are shepherding the toddler into a bath, and by 7:30 he is tucked in bed, drifting off to sleep.
Unless, of course, he’s sick, or needed extra stories, or we were walking around town and stopped somewhere for dinner, or had friends over… It really takes until at least 8.
If I came home every day from work (the commute being a whole separate how long it should/does take issue), expecting to be able to sit my butt down to write by 7:31 pm, then I would live my life feeling like I can’t do it all. All I have to do is tell myself to start at 8, and suddenly a few extra words at 7:45 feel like a HUGE accomplishment.
Speaking of those extra words… I thought I knew how long it took me to write a 30,000 word novella. i wrote 25k in two weeks last summer, sent it to an editor for 2, and finished it up in another week. For the next in the series I’m working on, scheduling 3 weeks for a first draft seemed totally reasonable.
An yet here I am in week 5 with the end only now starting to appear.
Luckily, the optimistic past version of myself who thought 3 weeks was a good deadline also planned for a June release, so there is really plenty of time. When I sat down at the beginning of the year to plan it out, I wrote down way less than I felt myself to be capable of, and instead set very conservative final deadlines for myself.
This is all very interesting, you may be saying to yourself, but how does it help you plan your perfect writer mom day?
Daily goals should reflect a larger goal. You usually go grocery shopping for the entire week, not for just a single meal. Writing to write is fine, if your goal is not to publish. But even that “purposeless” writing is probably part of a larger continuous improvement goal (= you’re probably not writing in order to get worse).
Whatever you decide to put in a day, should be there for a reason. 2 hours on Twitter is totally fine if it’s part of a marketing strategy, networking, or even part of your “self-care” time (make sure it’s in there too, and avoid burnout). But a random 2 hours with no real goal in mind? You probably don’t need it.
The more you know yourself, the more realistic the goals are. I know I CAN write 4k words in a day. I did it once. But I also know that it was a Saturday and I had plotted like crazy the week leading up to it. I know most days 1000 is possible, and it’s usually more. Editing is a little faster. I know I like to push myself, which is probably why I set that 30k in 3 weeks goal. But I also know I get distracted, which is why I put June as the launch date.
If you’re just starting out, you may not know all these things about yourself. That’s totally fine, and there’s a handy little tracker in the Writer Mom Life Self-Publishing Workbook you can use to get started.
Small adjustments to your mindset can make a big difference. Hoping for something to happen the way you want it to is not the same as accepting it for the way it happens. Expectations are everything when it comes to translating “perfect” into reality. My perfect writer mom day a year ago looked like spending all day in the library, which was never going to happen. So I changed what perfect meant to me, and suddenly it seemed to happen a lot more often.
Starting about 30 minutes into your life as a mom, you know that nothing is predictable. You may not have made peace with that yet. And it’s okay to be mad some days that you couldn’t predict all eventualities and things had to change last minute. A perfect day doesn’t have to mean a day without stress.
If you’ve taken the time to get to know how you work, set your goals, and adjusted your mindset to embrace the reality of your writer mom life, then you may find that you’re actually okay with “you can’t do it all” today. Because you didn’t plan to do it all today anyway.
Recent Comments