We writers of the world are officially at the halfway mark of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and yours truly hit the halfway goal of 25k words yesterday! A whole day early. Huzzah!

I’m trucking along so far this November, and I’ve had a fairly easy go of it so far—minus losing nearly a day’s worth of writing due to my laptop’s keyboard malfunctioning, but I had an old backup ready to go while it sits in Apple’s repair clutches. What’s MORE important for me than hitting the 50k mark this month is achieving that elusive thing I’ve been struggling at for years: a work/life balance.

And, you guys, so far I’VE BEEN ROCKING IT.

I’m not really sure why/how I’ve found this all so difficult in the past because this year it’s CAKE, but maybe I needed those years of trying and failing for everything to finally click. I have multiple NaNo projects I’m working on (new novel, development of novel, and blog posts). All these are word-count generators for my NaNo tally, and they take priority over other work-related tasks for the day that don’t generate words. Those are: finding and compositing/creating photos for said blog posts, research for the novel, reading, and learning writing craft—which can be reading craft books, working my way through courses I’ve enrolled in, writing conferences, etc. I do some of these things (if not all) every day, but right now they come after the word-generating work.

So, that’s my work life, and I’ve found great success in “chunking” out my day into small, manageable tasks. Lately, I’ve found that I don’t have the focus or attention span to do one thing for very long, so 1) breaking up my day into smaller tasks is extremely helpful for that, and 2) identifying what these tasks are is HUGELY helpful for not sitting around twiddling my thumbs trying to think of what to do next. Or worse, staying on a task I think I should stay on past the point of productivity. Nope, I know what comes next, and I can move right along.

I actually took a break during the writing of this post to unload and reload the dishwasher, and now I’m right back to writing. This is working for me!

The other component to a work/life balance is LIFE. Same ideas apply: identify the important things, like daily chores and spending time with my husband, and put those first. Secondary things (for when I just need to get up and move) largely amount to unpacking, because we recently moved and will be unpacking our lives for the next 5 years. More in-depth cleaning falls into this category too; during such a busy month, it’s more important to maintain things than to dive into any new, intense projects.

A last important concept is communicating and spending time with family and friends. I’ve also achieved this, largely by grouping my work and friend time together in the context of write-ins for friends who are also doing NaNoWriMo. Or, I’ll bring writing with me when I go somewhere. For instance, I was visiting a non-writing friend at the beginning of the month on a night she had band practice. We caught up before and after, and during I had lovely live music to write to. Score!

I have been succeeding at this Every. Single. Day.  I am doing multiple things from multiple lists and actually being productive. I feel like I’ve led my whole life to get to this moment, to achieve a balance of interests, activities, and adulting. It feels amazing, and more than reaching 50k, I am developing good habits that will carry me into the months and years ahead. This is my new schedule. This is my new life.

Look out, world. I am SuperProductiveAwesomePants, and who knows what I’ll accomplish next??