Reflecting on progress for the week of January 31 through February 6, and previewing goals and tasks for the upcoming week.

Spending the week in Phoenix visiting my wife’s parents - we’ve all quarantined, so it’s all good. Week 1 down. One more week to go.

The most challenging thing about traveling, in my opinion, is maintaining some type of routine or schedule that supports your writing or creative endeavors. My week’s been a mess. The time change - AZ is an hour ahead of LA - is still something I can’t remember. I don’t know how many times I’ve logged into Zoom an hour before a meeting was supposed to start.

But, as I reflect on the week that was I realize I accomplished more than expected, though I’m a tad short from what I had hoped to accomplish. Time management and breaking down tasks/projects is super challenging when traveling. However, doing something is always better then doing nothing.

That’s my takeaway for the week: it’s better to commit even 10 minutes of work everyday to a creative project than doing nothing. Sounds simple. But as we all know, life gets hectic fast. Finding 10 minutes to just be by yourself and work on something can be overlooked.

So for this week I’m going to work on finding at least 10 minute chunks throughout the day to complete my goals - 10 minutes between meetings, 10 minutes between my kid’s Zoom classes, 10 minutes before spending time with my kids. All that matters is forward momentum, no matter how many minutes or hours you have.

Successes for the Week

• Lots of work on developing the characters for my new pilot. The other night I had a major revelation about my project - a wrinkle in the story that logically makes sense (at least to me) and provides an interesting hook. The resulting change in concept meant I had to review and make edits to some of my notes on characters.

• 1 blog post. Hey, at least I did 1!

• Met with my accountability group and gave feedback to a few writers. We also talked a lot about strategy and ways to approach the business.

• Started week 2 of The Craft Course through ISA. It’s a nice refresher to some of the stuff I learned at UCLA. More tools for the toolbox.

Misses

• Blog posts. I have got to figure out a better way of sitting my butt down before my writing session begins and write a blog post. That’s really what this whole thing is about - getting my imagination and fingers ready to begin work.

• Ideally I would have finished all the tasks I want to complete for my character development work. I did a TON of stuff this week, but there’s some ideas/tasks that I’d like to focus on before moving on to a story document.

Goals/Tasks for the Week

• Publish a blog post every day. It’s gonna happen. In fact, I have the following structure laid out in my writer’s notebook. Here is what the blog posts entail:

  • Learning/Reflection for the day: What did I learn about writing and creativity that I could share?

  • Today’s Accomplishments: What did I accomplish today relative to my weekly tasks/goals?

  • Tomorrow’s Tasks/Goals: What do I need to accomplish tomorrow in order to meet my weekly tasks/goals?

  • Today’s Story Worthy Moment: What is 1 moment from today that could be used (or inspire) an event or character in a story?

• Finish character work. Below is what I’m thinking as far as task management:

  • Mon/Tues - Character bios

  • Wed/Thur - Character intros/entrances

  • Fri/Sat - Character rules for public life, personal life, and private life.

  • Sun - Work on Antagonist

• Meet with writer’s group on Wednesday and get feedback on my logline and story concept for my new pilot. First time I’m sharing with someone, so I’m curious to hear their responses/feedback.

• Meet with accountability group on Thursday to share my new pilot concepts and discuss business strategy.

• Work on Week 2 of The Craft Course.