A New Keyboard Will Save My Writing

Why make a project plan when you can just get a new keyboard, right?

Nothing by halves, as I like to say.

So I’ve have my late-mid-life crisis and survived to write about it, and the verdict from it all is that I’m going to write every day for the rest of my life. Ideally, this takes the form of writing novels (though I do really like these essays and am looking forward to launching my newsletter **soon**), and my big dream is to make enough of a living with all my creative endeavors to quit my day job. Dream big, they say, so I have.

But in the meantime, I’ve got to get organized.

Here’s the terrible truth - having spent much of my professional life as a project manager and consultant, I am very well trained to see when a client is not organized enough and is spread too thin, and I’m here to say that, dearest Dave, you have too much to do and are spread too thin.

This is not a new problem.

Focus has always been a challenge for me, what with unrestrained ADHD running my brain for most of my life. In the last 15 years or so, I’ve been able to arrest it somewhat through diet, sleep, exercise, and sobriety, but it still is a deep part of me, and I often still get distracted by new shiny things, much to the frustration of my loved ones, and, sometimes, myself.

So in deciding to put all my chips in on writing every day and really pushing to make this writing thing work, which includes not only posting here but interacting with the community, both collectively and individually, let’s just say there are many, many new things for me to do, and I’m not doing a good job of tracking them.

I need a plan. Really I need a project manager to get all this stuff out of me and track it daily, weekly, and quarterly, with a roadmap and regular check ins. That would be ideal. And I would love to be my own project manager, because I’m a really good project manager and I’m also very passionate about my own projects. I’ve made some lists and tried to get my dates and deliverables into Monday.com but that really took too much time and frankly, I already have a day job.

The truth is I like writing and thinking about writing too much and my mind just goes and goes and goes, and while the professional, organized side of me sees that the writer me is a bit of a mess (also a totally sweet and friendly chap), as I lean more into the writing side, I just keep adding to the mess in my head.

So, feeling frustrated and a little bit lost in my 2025 roadmap, I did what any respectable writer does when they are overwhelmed:

I bought a new keyboard.

The MK670 Will Save My Writing Career Before It Starts

It’s a thing of beauty…

Totally serious here, I spent some good money on this thing (though I did not spend ALL the money I wanted - I’ll wait until I sell my next book) and it just came in the mail yesterday. For better and worse, I’m still using my non-ergonomic keyboard today, for this one last post.

My previous amazing keyboard died while I was unemployed in early 2024, and I just couldn’t justify spending more than $25 on a piece of tech like that, so I bought this sort of okay but definitely not good for my wrists Logi keyboard on FB Marketplace that has served me fine in the last 15 months or so.

And this old one won’t go anywhere, because I’m a Gen Xer and unable to throw things like this away, so it will go downstairs in the pile of tech that may or may not be useful in the future.

(In a barely relevant aside, in a fever pitch of purging a couple years ago, I threw away a number of “unused” power supplies from my tech pile, only to discover that one of those power supplies was actually needed to power an old external hard drive that I discovered, sadly, has a proprietary power coupling and now I can’t find a power supply that works on it. So now I can’t access the files on my old backup drive. Hmph. Lesson learned: never throw anything away, ever.)

But yesterday was so hectic that I didn’t get a moment to get my new keyboard up and running, and I’m up early now to write this before putting on my monkey suit and heading inside the Beltway for my twice monthly dose of soul-crushing traffic and friendly office-interactions. So tomorrow then, for my new keyboard, and that will solve all my problems, right?

One Fewer Excuse - Or is it One Less Excuse?

Honestly, with all my writing, I’ve been surprised that my wrists don’t hurt with this non-ergonomic keyboard. I’m old enough to have had my first bout with bad-posture-related arm and wrist troubles way back in the late 1900s, and for a good while when I was writing novels decades ago I couldn’t go more than a couple days of writing without my wrists acting up.

Fortunately, I’ve not had any of that start up in the last six months since I’ve been writing at my desk so regularly, but I’m sure I have better posture and know how to take breaks and just treat myself better overall. So getting this nice, new keyboard feels like preventative maintenance and I definitely feel like a responsible adult now.

For the time being at least. And now, no more excuses, right?

So What’s the Plan, Stan?

Where was I? That’s right: ADHD and my lack of a plan for all the stuff in my head. So what is next?

Well, I’ve been thinking lately a lot about entropy and how everything in my life (and your life too) breaks down. Like Everything Everything (coincidentally, also one of my favorite bands that you should totally check out). I’ve been thinking about this as Real Life continues to swallow large chunks of my free time as I care for two broken bathroom sinks, a family of chipmunks that is eating my front garden, a leak in my car that caused flooding and then molding the floor, and my general inability to get into a regular sleep pattern for more than a couple of days (and today has me up at 3:45am but hey at least I’m writing, right?).

So what’s the point of putting down a plan when it doesn’t last long? I can take the rest of the week off from writing and spend hours and build out my plan for the rest of 2025, aligning my goals to monthly and quarterly checkpoints so that I can course correct and put the systems in place that show me my progress and give me the data to help me build the next plan for the next quarter, on and on and on for the rest of my career.

I can do that. I have the skills the know-how to manage myself to the right level of granularity to ensure my success. And if I’m really going to take a swing at this writing thing, with at least novels and newsletters, but also definitely a few games and probably even a YouTube channel, I really should have a plan. Something tangible to keep myself accountable and organized.

Even the act of sitting down regularly (monthly?) and organizing everything so I don’t have to worry when I get distracted because I know that past me has taken care of present me with direction and the right to-dos - even that will be a really great start.

But honestly, I don’t want to put together a plan. I just want to write. And write some more. And just keep writing.

The cold reality of our modern, creative life is that everything does break down, that everything does need to be rebuilt and refreshed regularly, or it will disintegrate in our hands. And this includes our plans for being a successful, paid-a-living-wage author, because no one will hold our hand, no one will bet on a new author, and there are no accidental successes in art these days.

This is what I struggle with more than anything: How to engage with all my wild plans and desires to write new things every day… How to engage with new communities when I already have too many communities that I don’t engage with… How to put together a master plan that has all the answers and I just need to hit the marks…

These are the things I need to figure out, but I just have no plan how to do them.

At least I’ve got a new keyboard.