This year, I’ve decided to take part in NaNoWriMo – national novel writing month. This is ‘an annual Internet-based creative writing project that takes place during the month of November in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript between November 1 and November 30’.

Naturally, I’m using Recurrer to push me along. I’ve added a dailyish task in there to ‘write required daily NaNoWriMo words’. This word count will vary over time. It starts at 1667 words/day (50000 words divided by 30 days), but this required daily number changes based upon how many words you have left and the amount of days left in the month. (Currently, I’m on 10,803 words after five days, leaving me with 39,197 words from 25 days = 1567 words/day).

As I said, I’ve set up my NaNoWriMo writing as a dailyish task in Recurrer (min recurring 1, preferred recurring 1, max recurring 2). In other words, I can miss one day if I have to, but on the second day, the task becomes critical.

The impact of having this task pushing its way into my list pretty much every day is that other tasks drop out. The NaNoWriMo task has settled into roughly two hours per day. Because of this, roughly two hours of other recurring tasks are going to be squeezed out of my daily to do list. The way the Recurrer algorithm works, that means less urgent tasks are going to be pushed away from the preferred rate of recurrence out towards the maximum recurring time frame, in order to make way for my more time-urgent NaNoWriMo task. The other, less urgent tasks, will still get done, but they’ll get done at the outer range of my preferred time frame.

Unfortunately, one of those tasks is ‘publish pieces on Recurrer blog’. So if you don’t see much from me on this blog in November, now you know why.

PS I’m using an app I wrote myself – Keep Writing! – to help me churn through my daily words. If you’re looking for a simple app that pushes you to complete the words in a first draft, feel free to check it out.