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New Year of Rest and Recovery

The Importance of Rest and Work for Balance

By Terri AllenPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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Happy New Year everyone! Have you made your resolutions for the year? I have a list of about two or three so far but I want to explain my logic for the ways I plan on completing these resolutions while not giving myself a major burnout.

A lot of my personal resolutions for the new year are work related and money related so I needed to have a sit down with myself and figure out an easy way to hit these goals without dropping myself into a pit of burnout and despair.

Finishing a Complete First Draft

So when it was November 2021, a mere two months ago, I managed to complete the 50,000 word total in a single month and that was a huge step for me completing the only resolution I made for 2021. Which by the way, was to write a book.

However, I wrote about seventeen chapters of a first draft and then I realized that I would never complete all thirty two chapters of my book in the word goal if I wrote a complete first draft. So I divided the remaining words I had to complete into the remaining chapter I had outlined and wrote the basic outline of the chapter to read the goal.

This means that from chapter one to seventeen I have a first draft and from chapter eighteen to chapter thirty two I have what is called a zero draft.

A zero draft is basically just a couple of sentences, or in my case a couple of paragraphs, to just get the most basic form of a story.

My first resolution for this year is to go back and take these zero drafted chapters and turn them into a first draft.

Now if I look at this with two big hopes then it can seem overwhelming and it can cause me to not want to complete the work. So I look at one chapter at a time, adding a hundred words here, making this one sentence into a paragraph, making sure I show and don’t tell.

Writing a book is a marathon not a sprint and I have the entire year to get it to a stage where I am willing to call it a fully formed first draft.

You need to set yourself small goals which add on to the bigger goal and make sure you don’t over work, treat yourself in between the goals and CELEBRATE your successes.

Don’t Overwork Myself and Learn to Say No

“Can you do an extra shift at work?”

“Can you come in early today?”

“Can you cover this shift?”

“Can you stay later tonight?”

No I can’t, I have a life and I want to be able to enjoy my free time, see my friends and work on my writing. This is something that I started to learn last year when I started therapy. My therapist helped me to realize that my free time is more important than my workplace having extra bodies on shift.

I realize that sometimes I feel good to do an extra shift and if I feel like this is something that I can do without mentally draining myself then of course I am going to say yes because money is a key motivator for me.

However I am not going to make my job my entire life.

Save Up Money

This is an obvious one but it does mean that it contradicts my previous resolution a bit because I don’t want to be working my entire year away just for the added bonus of saving more money.

Although there are so many ways in which I plan on saving more money. I don’t want to overspend my money on stuff that I don’t need, I want to make sure that I put it away for Christmas and birthdays so that I don’t end up in the same situation as I was for Christmas 2021. I was utterly skint for the last few months of the year and it’s affecting my money saving for the first month of 2022.

I don’t want to entirely cut out everything that brings me joy by not buying myself stuff that makes me happy but I want to have a considerable amount of savings.

What are some of your ways that you want to spend the new year? Are you wanting to be more focused on work and productivity or do you want to focus more on rest and recovery, like me?

self help
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About the Creator

Terri Allen

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