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On Hiatus: Pajama Productivity — Blog, Blogger, Podcast, Llamas and All

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Hand clutching a lit sparkler rising out of ocean water

Someone must be sacrificed to relieve the work situation of stress and unsettled feelings.

~ My Tarot reading, just now.

So, you might have noticed I’ve been a bit scattered here lately with my focus. I’d indicated we were launching the PJP podcast come hell or high water this summer … and, clearly, have not done so yet.

I also had these grand plans to write every day on Medium during the month of May — and did, for awhile, but then realized what I was writing wasn’t actually useful, so I stopped doing that.

Basically, I just shut everything down for a bit to give myself time to think.

At the same time, there was other stuff going on — work was picking up, life was getting unusually hectic due to the kiddo’s plans and some unrelated personal things, not relevant here — and my bandwidth was just all used up. I couldn’t give the attention or mental energy to anything related to this site that is necessary for me to do good work and offer something of value here, so I just shut it all down, across the board. All the blogs, not just this one.

I’ve been re-evaluating my creative goals during my little mini-shutdown, and these are the conclusions I’ve come to:

  1. There may have been a point in time when I could juggle the demands of multiple blogs, plus work, plus my own personal creative endeavors.
  2. Whenever that time may or may not have been for me, that time is most definitely not now.
  3. At the same time, my goals have undoubtedly shifted. What I want to achieve is much more personal, and at the same time more personally challenging, than the familiarity of blogging and writing. The writing I want to do now is fiction.
  4. Whatever else I struggle with, I am sure that at least right now, at least for the foreseeable future, I need to focus on those fiction projects.
  5. In other words, I need to stop writing about how to be productive if I’m going to actually produce.

And that’s what’s going to happen … sort of.

I’m putting Pajama Productivity on hiatus. Probably for the rest of the year, if not longer, though I’m not swearing I won’t come back and post something useful if the mood strikes.

But the podcast is on hold indefinitely. No regular blogging schedule here or anywhere else, except at some point in the future I’ll be relaunching Annie Sisk Writes. I may end up writing about related topics there, such as writing craft, creative productivity, and work habits as they relate to writing, anyway.

There are a lot of reasons for this decision. Primarily, it’s just a growing sense of internal pressure. I know I can’t keep all those diverse balls in the air at the same time in a way I’d feel proud having my name attached to them.

I confess there have also been a few little “signs and omens” here and there, such as the quote from my Tarot reading above, and the fact that the last several email newsletters have seen attrition in subscribers. Normally unsubscribes don’t bother me but I haven’t been picking up new subscribers at the same rate, and clearly many of you aren’t resonating with what fascinates me, which is totally cool – but it makes me wonder why I’m continuing to pour energy and effort into something that’s not apparently all that useful to others?

That might sound like “I’m taking my toys and going home.” I promise it’s not. I just reached a point today where I literally stopped and asked myself: “This few subscribers, these few page views … why am I doing this again? I could put that time and energy towards my novel…”

And as that thought reverberated in my addled brain for a few minutes, it made more and more sense until it seemed like the most obvious no-brainer ever.

Maybe I’ll regret this. Maybe I’ll come running back in September when the kids go back to school and the wind turns cool and my thoughts naturally run to productivity and learning and Doing Stuff.

Unless and until that happens, though, I’m over at my writer’s site, and I’m working diligently to complete my novel. Come join me there, if that sort of thing interests you! Until then, I’m putting the llamas out to pasture for a much-needed break — all that typing is murder on their hooves, they tell me — and focusing on me for a change.

Photo Credit: 
Kristopher Roller

The post On Hiatus: Pajama Productivity — Blog, Blogger, Podcast, Llamas and All appeared first on Pajama Productivity.


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