One of the most important things for me is the establishment of a routine. I work better that way, and always have. It’s a difficult thing, the self-discipline of routine when you don’t have the framework of a work day or firm deadlines. That is the one thing I am most grateful for my postgraduate years – all of my PhD work had to be self-motivated. In other words, I got used to it.

My routines aren’t everyone’s. I’m still limited by physical capabilities (though they are less limited than they have been in the past). I still need to sleep more than most people I know, and I need to be strict about my sleeping patterns. I need to eat regularly. I need to get physical activity into every day.

Most weekdays I don’t get up until around 9am (yeah, you can all stop throwing things at me now). I’m thinking about pushing that back and getting some exercise in first thing in the morning. I seem to be waking up earlier as the days lengthen, so that may be possible.

Mornings, I catch up on email and correspondence, and also do some reading of rss feeds via Google Reader if I have time. If I need to clean or run errands, I try to get them done before noon. At noon, I settle down with the laptop and write. Break for lunch at around 1pm, then write until around 3pm. 3-4pm is reading time, then 4-5/6pm is internet time. Most of which is spent on livejournal, though I’m spending more time on Google Reader as well at the moment.

My evenings are more flexible. Watching television, reading, catching up on review work, more internet time. I try to get into bed by 10-10.30pm, and then read for a while again.

I do strive to always be flexible. For example, my reading time today was spent mostly reading short stories for review instead of a novel.

Where is the boundary pushing, you might ask? It’s in the extension of writing time. Previously, I’d only been getting about an hour of real work done, and I’m pushing that to 2-3 hours now. It’s possible that I’ll have to cut back in the future, but for now this is working.

Now to get the pesky exercise in every day.