Tag: kanban

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The New Era Begins

I’m home from Literary Love Savannah, and this time, I didn’t have an Evil Day Job to immediately get back to!

Instead, I spent yesterday luxuriating in some new stickers and creating my plan through July 31st. Give me a purple pen, sticky notes, washi, and stickers, and I’ll prepare for book world domination.

It’s ridiculous how excited I was to start my day yesterday — because of the stickers. I didn’t need an alarm. Once Honey Bun was up, I hopped out of bed and got busy printing my new pages for the rest of July. I’m using a combination of HB90 Daily pages (on the left) and Sarra’s Rough Draft Challenge notebook (on the right). I’m using it both to sketch out my day–and then also hold myself accountable with how I actually spent my time. When I got up. How long of a lunch break I took. When I got tired or distracted.

The RDC pages work best for a single story, and I’m concurrently working on several, so it’s not ideal. I may tweak this process for August, maybe even a separate RDC page for each book? Though that seems a little extreme, even for me. Especially since each book already has its own place in my bullet journals to record the sprint tallies, notes, and any journaling thoughts I want to capture.

Yes, bullet journalS, plural. Right now, I’m actively working in four different journals, and I’ve got at least two others started for different projects. I do combine ideas into journals once they get going, mixed with general brain dumps and actual journal pages. Once a series reaches a certain size, it really needs its own. The House Isador journal is almost completely full. I probably won’t even try re-copying all of the names and characters over to a new journal, but will keep the old one as the reference and add new pages in the second.

The Dynosauros world got its own journal with the completion of Monstrous Baby. And yeah, I started Monstrous Rampage today.

I’m also about 2/3 of the way through a short story for Guillaume in the Headless anthology.

I pulled out Blizzard Bound’s journal (combined with other stuff currently) and will prepare for a re-read and pick up that project again this week.

Once Guillaume’s story is done, I intend to re-read what I’ve got for Queen’s Purge, and maybe even Crusade, so it’s all fresh. Though I may also have to work on Helayna and Karmen’s stories concurrently once I get a bit further in Shara’s plot.

See why I need so many journals? I can’t keep it all in my head any more.

I’m also returning to my Kanban board for admin tasks, though it’s not fully set up yet. I used it to prepare for LLS and still have some outstanding tasks I need to wrap up now that I’m home. Like a retirement party! I’m planning to write in the morning and early afternoon, and then do admin tasks in the late afternoon before dinner. Molly and I still Zoom most weeknights too with a goal of two more evening sprints.

So I have no excuse for not getting a shit ton of stuff done this July.

Despite it only being the 16th, I’ve already written more this July than I did the entire month last year, even with taking last week off for LLS. July is historically a really hard month for me (so is August) but with enough stickers….

I can do anything.

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Kanban Board

kanbanOver the past few years at the Evil Day Job, we’ve started using an “Agile” method of developing on certain key projects.  This involves taking a large project and breaking it down into individual pieces and hanging them on a board (physical or electronic) into three or more different columns. It could be something like “Ready,” “In Progress,” and “Complete.”  (Ours at work are more complex for testing, etc.)

The real goal is to keep only ONE thing in the “In Progress” section of the board so you can concentrate on it. Then we have daily – yes DAILY – stand-up meetings of about 15 mins to go over each person’s responsibilities on the board and make sure it’s up to date. If you can’t continue for some reason, then you mark the project as “blocked” and pull a new item from the ready board.  Then it’s management’s job to help you become unblocked and keep things moving into the Complete column.

The hardest part for me is keeping only one thing in the In Progress column, at least for work!  I’m always on 2-3 projects at once.  Even if I’m on a big several-thousand-hour project, they always still find ways to slip a maintenance or support item in that needs to be done.

I’ve tried the agile method for writing before and it just didn’t work, at least the way I had my board set up.  I’ve got so many ideas, and at the time, I had two publishers, plus the stories I wanted to write, plus all in various stages of writing, editing, production, promotion, etc.  It was impossible for me to keep track of everything that way, and certainly unrealistic to only have ONE task going at any one time.

However, someone recommended KanbanFlow to me a month or so ago (it’s free!) and this time, it’s working.  I think it’s part of the situation I’m in right now – sort of starting over fresh and trying to concentrate on one project, rather than keeping a bunch of pipes flowing at the same time.  I still have promotional, website, etc. updates to do, but I don’t keep them on my board.

I’ve been using one main board for only the fantasy romance. I broke out all the tasks, like worldbuilding, character development, etc and slowly moved them to the complete column. Then I took drafting the story and broke it down into small chunks, even writing the first draft.  I color-coded all the different tasks, which both makes it pretty and also easy to see what things go together.

What makes KanbanFlow work for me this time around is the built-in Pomodoro timer.  I can pick a task, set the timer for 25 mins, and work.  That’s honestly about all I can concentrate right now (and sometimes even that’s a challenge!)  Then the timer gives me 5 mins to take a break.  Usually I just do one session and quit, because it’s late at night when I’m finally opening up Scrivener.

Then I can look back at each completed task and see how long it took me – assuming I remembered to select the task and set the timer.  I figure I can do about anything for 20-25 mins, even make my brain pay attention!  And it’s working, for the most part.  I started with 500 word tasks. Then started bumping it up with weekly goals, which I’m still fine tuning. I really want to work up to 5K a week but that’s not happening yet.

I’m still fighting the “don’t wanna” camp, so anything’s a distraction.  Ooooh, a new game!  Oooh, I should research that!  I know, I’ll check Twitter…

When I finally open my file, it’s almost always after 11 PM.  Ugh.  But I am hitting 500 words most days, so I am making progress. I’d like to work up to 1K a day, but I’m going to have to figure out how to stop the time wasting.  I think once I get deeper into the flow and rhythm that I won’t have to fight the piddly things so much.

If electronic kanban boards doesn’t work for you, you can make one easily on your wall with Sticky notes or a piece of poster board. The visual “In Progress” column is a good reminder to keep working on that next task!