February is challenge month: I gotta get some @$!& written

February is the shortest month, which makes it the best month for one-month challenges!

(Note that we’re still doing activism regularly, but that’s not a one month and done thing.  That’s a we can’t become a fascist state thing and it’s going to last potentially for years.)

Last year I was most worried about my sedentary life style. (Apparently that was also the focus in the previous year.)  This year I decided not to make a challenge out of that, but I’ve moved my “trying to take a walk” thing to lunchtime instead of after work, and that’s been working out a lot better for me, especially since I no longer want to surf the internet on my lunch break like I once did.  Plus I’m back to 6 hours of teaching each week which is surprisingly good exercise when you use the board a lot and get really excited about math…

Prior to that we did a number of frugality challenges, but while DH is still employed we need the time more than we need the money, so they’re kind of exercises in pointlessness.

What is really a problem with my life right now is that I have NOTHING UNDER REVIEW.  My last under-review paper is forthcoming.  That’s it.  Nothing is under review.  Nothing.  Some of that is that I spent way too much time writing a couple of book chapters.  Some of it is my work being accepted fairly quickly.  But a lot of that is that the election and activism and getting back into teaching etc. have kind of pushed me off my regular work rhythms and I haven’t been doing the writing/data munging/reading/email/classprep daily routine that usually works best for me.  This month is going to change that.  I am going to have a conference-ready draft of one paper by all of the upcoming March deadlines and I’m going to have something under review before my annual report is due.

How am I going to do that?  The old-fashioned way.  I need to start my mornings with an hour of writing.  If I can commit to that, the rest falls into place because I need to have something to write about.  I also can’t putter around during the quiet 8am hour on days I have a 9:30am class and I certainly can’t spend the morning on the internet before putting my clothing on and getting to work.  The five day a week habit will hopefully get back into place for March itself, but the challenge will also include weekends.  The one day a week I will take off from early morning writing is the day of my 8am office hours, for which I will do the writing later in the day (I have late office hours another day).

I may not have a new draft done by the end of February, but I will be a lot closer to meeting those March deadlines than I am now.

So that’s my February challenge:  28 days of writing an hour each morning.  Starting today.