@elijah.mea.rs this is gonna be your problem to help me at some point 😂

I just want to point out that Alex Pretti became a registered nurse in early 2021 -- the height of death from Covid. And he chose the ICU, the sickest patients, in Veterans Affairs.

thank you so much!!

my brand forever will be these lil fuckos

thank you!! feeling really excited for it all!!

so excited for this!!

i am so grateful you introduced me to it. game changing life changing tool

Anyway—big fan of actually having data on hand. I recommend toggl track if you're interested in tracking your time. Even their free plan (which I use!) is VERY robust.

4) Merely from a cost-of-labor perspective, this is useful knowledge to have. It is what motivates me to submit to paying markets for short stories, and helps me keep a level eye on what a novel contract would actually break out to at an hourly rate.

3) I learned that I can, in fact, move WAY faster than I think if I'm actually focusing/turning off discord/slack/socials. "I bet you can get more done than you think in 30 mins" is a mantra I have started turning to when my brain is clearly "on" (though not work it when my brain is clearly "off")

2) I learned that even if I felt like I spent so much time working on short story stuff, it was actually much less than what I spent working on novel stuff. This, I think, because short story submissions (not tracked) take up a lot of background processes in my brain

1) I learned that my average week of writing is ~6 hours a week;
>8 is a good week;
>10 is a really good week/work must be slow.

2025 was the first complete year of data that I tracked, and it was fascinating to see how things broke down: