The day I wrote 14046 words
Thursday, July 27, 2017
On March 10th, I wrote 14046 words, which is my absolute maximum in a day since I started tracking my writing in November. Not bad for being pregnant, with a foggy brain and rather tired.In the category of epic typing battles: I wrote 14046 words today #acwri This may be an all-time record.— Dr Eva Lantsoght (@evalantsoght) March 11, 2017
How did this word count break down?
I didn't write all 14046 words on a single writing project. Instead, I worked on several projects, as I do virtually every working day:
- 969 words on emails and admin
- 2536 words on my blog
- 1301 words on a journal paper writing project
- 8627 words on my book
- 613 words on a research report
The main chunk of my writing was done that day in the afternoon, as I was working on the first draft of my book, the A-Z of the PhD Trajectory. The book won't be published anytime soon, but it needs to go for review by March 31st 2018. I like being ahead of deadlines, and especially with the baby coming, I'm trying to finish up as much work as possible before I enter a stage in my life of which I have no idea what it will be like (and have no idea how to plan my days for).
So, what did I do that day that made it such a success?
- I slept 9 hours and 37 minutes, according to my fitbit stats, and woke up at 7:46 am. Unfortunately, that rather late wake-up did not give me enough time to squeeze in my yoga practice.
- I must have started with work some time between 8:30 am and 9 am. I worked first on my paper, and then on my research. The idea was to do about 2 hours of each, but since I got off to a late start, it must have been more like 1,5 hours of each. For the research, I was doing calculations, and writing the report about these calculations at the same time, so it was a bit of a combination of writing and the actual number-crunching in matlab.
- I had lunch. Since I was working from home that day, I think I didn't spend more than 30 minutes on lunch: warming up my plate of food, and then quickly eating it.
- I wrote 25 entries for the extended glossary list of my book. When I was working on writing these entries, I made a list with the numbers (1-25), and write down the title for every 5th entry. After each entry was finished, I checked off the number. After 5 to 10 entries, I took a break. This writing kept me busy from 1 pm until about 5pm.
- I replied email for about an hour, and made my planning for the next week.
- I went for a walk while talking to my mom via Skype, and had my dinner.
- I took my laptop to the sofa to type a blog post.
- According to my myfitnesspal account, I had three servings of chocolate peanut butter avocado pudding.
I'm not sure what is the main reason for my major productivity that day: the long sleep the night before? The fact that I was working from home rather undisturbed (except for the lady coming to clean the apartment)? All the chocolate pudding I ate that day?