Well, for a day with such a late start, I’ve really made extremely good progress. I’m starting to see that my specialist was right when he said that I would be to cope without medication for ADHD if I put my mind to it. I need to do something about all these late starts, but I think it is fair to say that my concentration today has been second to none. In fact, my concentration has been far better than you might expect out of a typical office worker — I have kept my online sessions brief, and when done, I have unplugged the modem each time. Most importantly, when I have got up and gone away from my desk, I’ve also made sure that my modem has stayed unplugged, as this ensures that when I return, I just get on with the work that needs doing, and avoid needless messing around.
This doesn’t mean that I have completely blocked off all contact with the outside world — quite the opposite. Instead of just flitting around from one website to the next (how much time can that waste?), or reading people’s Facebook updates, I’ve actually decided to try and physically get in touch with people I haven’t seen for ages, and I think I’ve made about 10 such requests. That’s what all the social networking site should really be for — actually seen people in the flesh, not just catching up on idle gossip online!
As far as progress is concerned, I try to do a minimum of 1000 words each day, although I do like to make sure that goes on my main website. Today, I’m already over 5000 words, but all of this is going on Mind Pilot. Theoretically, if I’m creating content that is told like a story (like this particular post), I can produce just over 2000 words in an hour, so if there was ever a voice recognition ‘marathon,’ it might be to aim for 26,000 words in one-day! I don’t think I’m going for that any time soon — in fact I think my best day so far is around 5000, so if I can get up to 6 or 7000 today, that would be really impressive, especially with such a late start. Even though I’m not doing anything that has a direct commercial value, I’m not so concerned. I’ll freely admit that I obsess about my own personal productivity, but I don’t think it always has to be defined monetarily. I’ll feel that the day has been useful if I have at least managed to extract something from my head and stick it down into a format that is useful for somebody somewhere. The downside of this is that I don’t spend anything like as much time on other creative activities such as drawing (either by hand or in graphics programmes like Flash), painting or photography. Even when I do take photos, I very rarely actually take them off the memory card and process them on the computer. I’m even less likely to then get photos printed — but here’s another comment I have made on this blog that I think will make me much more likely to take action in the future.
Outside, there is still a bit of noise from people moving between pubs, and some idiot has just set a car alarm of, but I’m not then let that distract me too much. Of course, I’ve commented on it, but as I’ve said before, I’m trying to make this blog a conversation, rather than something more formal and if you are sitting having a chat with a friend, and a car alarm went off in front of you, one of you would mention it wouldn’t you?
I have still got six of the 10 possible blog posts I mentioned earlier on that I would do to get on with, and if I completed all of them, I think that would really be quite something for the day. Regardless of that, I think I can tick most of the boxes that the Mind Pilot routine ‘ requires’ — I think that will be post number 11: