A Stall in Progress

This happens from time to time. I'll be really productive some months (crazy in others, like nanowrimo) but on the flip side of that, there will be weeks or a month where not much gets done. Everything just stalled for the past week or so. But that's okay.

Actually, part of the reason for my recent stall (no blogging, editing, writing, reading) was due to a cold. For the past week, all I've done is work, sleep, go through kleenex and now cough. That was all kinds of fun, let me tell you. *note: sarcasm*  So, that is my "excuse" for not getting much done lately. I felt up to nothing, not even reading a book. My daily writing went to over a week of 0 words per day. So, May is a slack month in progress wise. But now that I'm on the mend, I hope to make the second half at least somewhat productive.

I will admit, I don't feel that bad about not getting stuff done. Sure, it's a set back from some of my goals, like the editing, but at times things happen. Okay, I did feel a little discouraged seeing all those gray zeroes on my writing worksheet. But then I reminded myself that it's okay. I can still keep going and it's not the end of the world to miss a week of writing.

Sure, if things come up all the time and you don't find a way to work around them to get writing and such done, then it might become an issue. But an occasional set back, don't let it get you down. Things happen that get in the way of progress, projects can stall.

I also bring this up because I help moderate a writing web site and now there is a forum where Monday we post our goals for the week (5 days) and Friday we post the results. It's not many days, and some people get a bit ambitious. Honestly, I wish we did 7 day goals but that's a different story. Back to my point... Some people, when posting their results get very discouraged when they "fail" at what they had wanted to achieve. The post is a "woe is me" and "I'm so awful cause I didn't do what I wanted to do" types that start to get defeatist in tone. But try not to do that. I don't make many goals and some of them, I just don't achieve. Instead of getting discouraged, I just evaluate how things went, then figure out my next set of goals and keep moving forward.

This isn't just for writing either. Health and fitness comes with setbacks. Being sick affected how I ate and such for the whole week. Colds are tricky for weight too, for me. Cause I consumed mostly chicken noodle soup, orange juice and sprite, the scale shows a 2 lb loss. Which would be good but once I got back to eating regular food, I usually just gain in back in a few days. Because I can finally eat something besides soup. And it wasn't a healthy loss to being with because it's from eating only like 1000 calories a day and over half of it being liquid form. Plus, this stalls any exercise due to the fact that I slept when I wasn't at work.

Health, fitness, fiction, it all can stall from time to time. The question is what do you do after the stall to pick yourself up and get back to a level of productiveness.


Have you stalled on a project lately?
What do you do to get back into the swing of things?