History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Heat Mapping Productivity

| January 23, 2023

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on productivity heat mapping so I can get a better sense of the best way to structure my days. This is a system by which you look at your day in hour-long segments and see when you’ve had the best productive hours and the least productive hours. […]

Time Tracking

| March 28, 2022

One of the most valuable takeaways I’ve gotten from the productivity and creativity classes I worked on earlier this year is the idea of time tracking. In my day job, we track the amount of time we spend on projects in 15-minutes increments, so it’s not something that was foreign to me. But the idea […]

What A Day Looks Like

| January 24, 2022

As I mentioned previously, I’m doing a lot of work this year with productivity and scheduling. As part of this, I’ve been tracking where my time goes in fifteen-minute increments throughout the day to see when I’m working on what type of project, and how much time I’m spending on things. One of the things […]

Building Productivity

| January 10, 2022

It’s one thing to tell yourself that you need to write daily (or every other day, or whatever schedule you give yourself) in order to grow as a writer. But it’s another entirely to work on growing your productivity. I’ve been working through some exercises provided by the brilliant Jessie Kwak (author of From Chaos to […]

A Year at Home

| March 15, 2021

Roughly a year ago, the company I work for made the call for all of its employees to work from home, as a result of the increasing spread of COVID-19. We thought it would be a short stint of work from home, but for us, it’s been a year, and there’s no clear sign of […]

Productivity during Stressful Times

| March 23, 2020

Many authors I know have recently found it a lot harder to get any writing done. Whether they’re adjusting to a new work-from-home lifestyle, or have more of their family members in their previously quiet house, social distancing and self-isolation have an impact on productivity. So too do the frequent news updates and the overall […]

Writing Lots!

| September 23, 2019

Last week, I hosted a guest post from Kurt Pankau, and he returned the favor by hosting a guest post from me! I wrote about how I’ve increased my writing output and the ways in which I get so much writing done. You can read all about it here!

Balancing Productivity and Burn-Out

| July 8, 2019

I turned the Fourth of July holiday into a long weekend by taking Friday off, and I gave myself a lengthy to-do list for the four-day weekend. I’m pleased to say that I made it through the list, but there were a few times when looking at it made me feel a bit overwhelmed, like […]

Growing as a Short Story Writer

| May 20, 2019

I started writing regularly in 2009 and lucked out by selling my first short story early in 2010. After that, things were a bit more hit and miss for a while. Between 2010 and 2014, I made a total of 11 story sales, some of them for no payment, and mostly for very small payments. […]