Writing progress

Posted on December 30th, 2007 by Sacha Chua

2For the chapter on task management, I have 10,715 words or 38 pages of raw text that still need be edited. This probably means I’m going to miss my goal of December 31. I still need to write two more sections on using tags and projects, which will be roughly another 2,000 words. I’ll try to write another 1,000 words today. I’m planning to spend the evenings and all of January 1 working on this. I think I can finish it this week. I’ll e-mail my editor to adjust my goal one week forward.

The next chapter is the one on taking notes. It’s also 35 pages, and I’ve budgeted a month for it. If I push my current deadline forward one week, I might still be able to make it to my next deadline of January 31, 2008. The raw text should take me about six days of writing 2,000 words each. I’m planning to write about the one-file approach, Remember, Org, Planner, Howm, Records, and blogging from Emacs. Budget in maybe one weekend for editing, and that comes out to writing for three hours every other weekday and doing a little more work on it during weekends. This kind of schedule will help me avoid the mistake I did this month, which was focusing on work during weekday evenings and working on the book only during weekends.

I’m also happy to say that I’m getting the hang of dictating to Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I’ve trained it to recognize things like Emacs and C-c, and I’m getting used to working with a combination of typing and speaking. I carry a portable voice recorder with me, and I dictate into it after I’ve taken off my contact lenses and can’t work at the computer. I’ve been using it for blog posts, chapter drafts, and the occasional rant about Emacs versioning. I’m also getting the hang of not freaking out about the ungrammatical things that Dragon NaturallySpeaking thinks I’ve said.

And I like not having to type.

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