Everyone’s got their New Year’s resolutions and I won’t bore you with my entire list (does anyone except me care that I’m determined to take a multi-vitamin everyday?). But I think this idea is fun. Or crazy. Or both. So I’m sharing.

I want to start “punching in” to my writing time. It’s real work, and it deserves real devoted time, and I feel like it would help me to mentally recognize it as such. Maybe it would cut down on the Wordtwist/Facebook/Twitter procrastination during my writing hours—but that’s not the big reason for doing it. There are weeks when I beat myself up for not spending enough time on my writing, and then there are weeks when I beat myself up for neglecting the rest of my life for my writing. Punching in, I hope, will help me to push aside the self-hate (and save it for more useful times, like when I eat birthday cake leftovers for lunch!). I set a goal at the start of the week: I will work X hours. I punch in, I punch out. I meet my goal (hopefully). Job done. No more guilt. It’s a variation on the old Butt In Chair (BIC time) concept. I also have visions of looking at my timecards, come next December, and feeling Very Good about how much time I put into my writing work.

Yes, I could use a spreadsheet or just scribble down times on a piece of paper. But why do that when there are fun old-fashioned TIME CLOCKS out there to play with, to be had for relatively cheap on Ebay?  I’ve got my eye on the Acroprint125 NR4. It’s a avocado green chunky square, and it even comes with time cards (if I’m going to do this… I might as well DO it). If I end up springing for it, you’ll see a picture of it installed in my writing space. It’s, um, tax deductible right?