Studies have shown that people who take periodic vacations – and give themselves permission to leave work behind during those vacations – are more productive than people who slog along no matter how tired or fried they are.

That doesn’t just apply in the corporate world. It also applies (maybe more so) when you are self-employed. Sometimes, when you are plugging away to learn more about your industry (in my case, writing and publishing and blogging), you are driven to keep pushing even when you’re no longer being particularly productive.

I’ve enjoyed and learned much from the Blogging 101 course. But because my learning curve is so steep, I’ve found that work on my novel has suffered, as I’ve put 8-10 hours per day into improving my blog site and interacting with other bloggers. I’ve not touched my novel for days, even though a helpful friend invested her own time in critiquing what I’d written with enough detail to offer comments in track changes. While I should be showing my appreciation by studying all of her comments and getting to work on necessary rewrites, I’ve allowed my time to be sucked up exclusively by blogging, playing with widgets and themes, reading other blogs, and commenting on said blogs, and circulating through the “Commons”, the site for Blogging 101 students where we can find and interact with other bloggers.

Enough already!

I’m taking today off (or what’s left of it) to just play!

And tomorrow I’m taking the day off to immerse myself in my novel and create a rewrite outline based on the recommendations provided. Because they are good comments and well founded, and rewriting with those in mind will make my novel stronger. And will improve my odds of finding an agent who says “Yes, I’d like to represent you” or a publisher who says “Yes, we’d like to publish your novel.”

During this time, I will not be posting or commenting on other posts. That’s not to say I won’t hang on to the notifications for later reading. But not today or tomorrow.

On Monday, I’ll be back in the cyber-classroom of Blogging 101. I will look forward to it, and will return refreshed and regenerated.

See you then!