One of the biggest stumbling blocks for me, getting into this whole “writing a book” thing, had been actually sitting down and doing it. It wasn’t a matter of writer’s block for me, or laziness, or ADHD. (Okay, maybe sometimes it was a combo of the last two.) Some days, I just couldn’t seem to get into the groove. Reading “The Journey from the Center to the Page” (thanks, Samer!) has been helpful, but I recently discovered an activity that has upped my productivity significantly: tandem writing sessions!
My cousin Cheryl down in DC is writing a novel, and found it really hard to get big chunks of work done, too. She said that she used to do this with a friend of hers, and would I be interested? I’ll give anything a whirl once. Here’s how it works:
- We have set appointments twice a week in the morning. One of us calls the other at the appointed time.
- We each say what we’re going to try and accomplish in that session, and how long we’d like to work for. (For us, it’s generally an hour at a time.)
- We also offer each other suggestions or share experiences that might be helpful.
- We hang up and get to work. I use the SelfControl app for Mac to block my access to email, Facebook and Twitter during that time.
- At the end of the hour, we call each other and relate how it went, what we were able to get done and what the next steps are.
Wash, rinse, repeat!
The accountability is what’s been the most helpful part of this. Sure, I can make a “meeting” with myself in my iCal to get work done, but knowing that I have to call someone, have a plan and execute itgives me that much more inspiration to get tough chunks of the book worked out. Also, working in tandem with someone who’s not in the same room doesn’t offer up the temptation to just sit there and chat for the whole hour.
All-in-all, a resounding Zandt Family Success Story, and highly recommended to others.
Shocking, shocking– a software update breaks things that it’s supposed to help. After I downloaded and installed the latest combo update for Leopard, my Mail.app went to hooey on me. It’d open, then open mailboxes, and then… choke on viewing messages. What to do? Here are the things I tried:
- A preface– someone once told me not to download the OS updates from Software Updater; rather, the better plan is to repair disk permissions (go to Applications –> Utilities –> Disk Utility), download the DMG from Apple’s website, install, and repair disk permissions again.
- When the problem happened after the initial install, I ran Vacuumail. It’s a program that cleans up the database behind Mail.app and makes it run faster. Still crashed after that.
- Then I deleted all the files from my ~/Library/Caches folder and restarted the computer. (For those that don’t know, the ~ stands for your username on the computer, your “home” folder.) Alas, no worky yet!
- MacFixit had a number of suggestions:
- trying moving your preferences files out of the default location and see if Mail can do its thing. This didn’t work for me, and honestly, it woulda been crappy if it did, because that would have meant re-setting up 7 mail accounts.
- Hold the shift key down when opening Mail. This tells Mail not to focus on any one message. Still didn’t help me.
- Resinstall the combo. Still no dice.
- A discussion at the Apple support forums mentioned trying to uninstall any plugins you have for Mail. If you didn’t have the install files to begin with, you could go to: ~/Library/Mail/Bundles and move anything that’s in there out to a temp location (like your desktop).
- Me, I decided to see first if any of my plugins had updates since the release of 10.5.6. They did! GPG Mail, which I use to send secure/private emails, had a new release on 12/30. Yippie. I downloaded it and installed it over the previous version. Opened Mail, and… magic! My problems were solved.
Hope this helps anyone else struggling with issues…
I’m not-so-slowly and very-surely running out of hard drive space on my little laptop, which is the central nervous system of all things DZ– especially now that I have a killer camera and am taking gianormous photos. WhatSize tells me the main culprits of space usage are my old mail archives (obsessively retained since early 2005, when I first went Mac) and of course, my pictures.
So, I’m wondering: what kinds of parameters are folks using for moving things to archive versus keeping on a running machine? The OCD-pack-rat in me likes having my entire world at my fingertips whether I’m home or not, but obviously this isn’t sustainable. (…she says as she’s downloading 7GB of pics from aforementioned camera.)
Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, to twitter me, or to drop a line.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for me, getting into this whole “writing a book” thing, had been actually sitting down and doing it. It wasn’t a matter of writer’s block for me, or laziness, or ADHD. (Okay, maybe sometimes it was a combo of the last two.) Some days, I just couldn’t seem to get into the groove. Reading “The Journey from the Center to the Page” (thanks, Samer!) has been helpful, but I recently discovered an activity that has upped my productivity significantly: tandem writing sessions!
