It was supposed to be a long weekend. The Labor Day holiday is occurring on Monday. It should have been a 3 days break from my regular working routine. It could have been full of epic writing sessions. However, a lot of work creeped into my holiday weekend. Some of that is completely my fault. All of that got me thinking about how to push my academic efforts forward. My pursuit of writing academic articles has started to take up more and more of my time. At the moment, I am in favor of scrapping the current batch of articles and starting work on two new ones. One focused on a management topic and the other focused on a public administration topic. One of them might even be a literature review. The current batch of articles might have been a false start. That happens. Sometimes you have to change gears to refocus on the things that are truly important. Each morning I try to write for one hour before everybody gets going in the house. That is always the plan. Sometimes it does not work. Sometimes it works well. My alternative writing method has been to work on my ASUS Flip Chromebook during television time.
Figuring out how to focus for an hour a day on writing is an important commitment in my life. Locking down a pure hour to focus on writing requires commitment. Life is full of surprises. Nobody else works on your schedule of inspiration. You have to capture it when you can. You have to seize the moment and strive forward. You have to stoke the fires of creativity and use the spark when you find it. Sometimes the only path forward is to try to bottle that inspiration for later. To that end, capturing solid notes and figuring out how to refocus after a disruption has become an increasingly important part of my skillset. It is not a part of my skillset that is overwhelming impressive, but it has been improving.
