Work Diary Gone Awry

Back in July, I wrote about the benefits of the work diary I'd been using for a year at that point. I'd found that it made me feel like I'd accomplished something and keeping track of the various projects I was working on allowed me to see which ones I was neglecting. Amusingly, however, in recent weeks it's been the diary itself that has been neglected.

You see, November was a tad hectic. I explained about my other November commitments alongside NaNoWriNo at the end of October and, to be perfectly honest, it all ended up being much worse than I'd anticipated. This year has quite possibly been one of my worst and November was the iceberg that sank me.

My last decent work diary entry was on 31st October: 'Wrote 800 words of Downton essay'. For the next two weeks there are spasmodic references to work accomplished but with no detail - I say I worked on my thesis, for instance, but don't say how many words I got down on paper or whether I was editing or crying over the laptop. Not much of a reference tool for how much work I'd done. Since 14th November I haven't documented a single thing. I think my head was in too much of a whirl.

I was juggling essay edits with my firm determination to complete NaNoWriMo and a thesis chapter that was intent - and still is, I think - on not fitting together properly. In addition, some personal problems finally got the better of me and I spent much of late November in a haze. I woke up, tried to cope with whatever my inbox was throwing at me, worked until my brain gave up then collapsed in a heap. It's possibly no surprise that as soon as my final, final, final essay rewrites were done I succumbed to that monster cold that's been going around. I'm still not completely better now, which is a mark of how hard something had to hit me in order to force me to slow down. There's a lesson in there somewhere but I'm not sure it's one I'm ready to learn.

So what of the work diary? I'll try and pick it up again in January, though I'm not sure if I'll be successful. If I get back to the point where I'm too all over the place to document what I'm doing then I fear 2014 may be as tricky as 2013 has been. And that, dear reader, is a frightening prospect.