Day 428: Mondays for business/marketing work
I’ve been looking at my schedule for the past several weeks. I originally intended to do social media/blogging/writing-related business on Saturdays, but I haven’t been doing that at all. Instead (assuming I’m in good health), I’m usually working on my book on Saturdays.
I think it’s partly because I don’t like losing momentum. Since I was working on the book all week, when Saturday rolls around, I want to get more done on it, especially if I ended up not getting as much done that week as I wanted to because of health or other reasons. Stopping my writing momentum is not only hard, I dislike doing it because I feel like I should take advantage of it, especially since it often takes a bit more effort to get it going in the first place.
Well, if that’s my personality, then maybe the most efficient way is to try to work around my strengths and my weaknesses. So instead of trying to fight my writing momentum, I’m going to try to move that non-writing day to Mondays and see how that goes. I’m not entirely sure if that will work or not, but since I’m not writing on Sundays, then doing blogging and newsletter marketing on Mondays might not be a bad transition into the week. I decided to experiment and see.
The one major potential problem I can see is that I tend to not get a lot done on Saturdays in general (maybe because it’s the weekend and my husband isn’t working (much), and because my writing Sabbath day is the next day). It was why I had originally planned to do my blogging and marketing on that day—since I tend not to get a lot done on Saturdays, I might as well do stuff that doesn’t require as much mental energy.
But that obviously hasn’t been working since I haven’t been blogging or marketing on Saturdays at all, I’ve been writing instead, even though I tend not to get a lot of writing hours in on Saturdays. So I’ll have to see if I can try to get a full writing day on Saturdays.
***
I was going to post the above yesterday, on Monday, just before I started work, but I ended up not getting that done, so I’m posting this on Tuesday. I took Monday to do writing-related business this week, as I had planned.
I did get the writing business stuff done, but … I suppose doing writing-related business is hard for me to do no matter what day of the week I do it.
The only difference in doing it on Monday is that I don’t have to take the effort to stop my writing momentum in order to do my writing business stuff. It was still hard to get myself to do all the business-related stuff yesterday, but it wasn’t nearly as difficult as it is to try to get myself to do it on Saturdays (and so consequently I never do my writing business stuff on Saturday at all).
So, on a whole, I think it’s a good idea (so far) to allocate Mondays to do my writing business stuff. I wrote my monthly newsletter, I wrote a few blog posts and scheduled them to post later this month, I answered questions for a couple interviews I had promised to do, I did some random self-publishing and marketing things, and I posted a knitting pattern on Ravelry to get a little traffic to the pattern on my blog.
This particular week was busier than most, so it took a lot longer than I had planned, and I ended up doing some of it today, also. Total, it was a little over 10 hours across two days. However, the good news is that next week will probably be very light in terms of writing business work.
There were a couple more things I could have done today, but I was feeling a little tired mentally and I decided to just put them on my To Do list and do them some other time. One marketing task especially will be a significant amount of work—at least a couple hours—so I didn’t want to start that today, plus the deadline for that isn’t until mid September, so there’s no rush to get it done.
I’m really glad I got this writing-related business work done! Now I can do my writing work starting tomorrow without any urgent tasks hanging over my head.
Outlining: time spent: 0
Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Total number of words: n/a
Writing: Overall writing speed: n/a
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 5 hours, 19 minutes
My takeaway for today: Rather than trying to do it on Saturdays, shunting my writing business work to Mondays seems to work better to ensure I actually do it.
I think it’s partly because I don’t like losing momentum. Since I was working on the book all week, when Saturday rolls around, I want to get more done on it, especially if I ended up not getting as much done that week as I wanted to because of health or other reasons. Stopping my writing momentum is not only hard, I dislike doing it because I feel like I should take advantage of it, especially since it often takes a bit more effort to get it going in the first place.
Well, if that’s my personality, then maybe the most efficient way is to try to work around my strengths and my weaknesses. So instead of trying to fight my writing momentum, I’m going to try to move that non-writing day to Mondays and see how that goes. I’m not entirely sure if that will work or not, but since I’m not writing on Sundays, then doing blogging and newsletter marketing on Mondays might not be a bad transition into the week. I decided to experiment and see.
The one major potential problem I can see is that I tend to not get a lot done on Saturdays in general (maybe because it’s the weekend and my husband isn’t working (much), and because my writing Sabbath day is the next day). It was why I had originally planned to do my blogging and marketing on that day—since I tend not to get a lot done on Saturdays, I might as well do stuff that doesn’t require as much mental energy.
But that obviously hasn’t been working since I haven’t been blogging or marketing on Saturdays at all, I’ve been writing instead, even though I tend not to get a lot of writing hours in on Saturdays. So I’ll have to see if I can try to get a full writing day on Saturdays.
***
I was going to post the above yesterday, on Monday, just before I started work, but I ended up not getting that done, so I’m posting this on Tuesday. I took Monday to do writing-related business this week, as I had planned.
I did get the writing business stuff done, but … I suppose doing writing-related business is hard for me to do no matter what day of the week I do it.
The only difference in doing it on Monday is that I don’t have to take the effort to stop my writing momentum in order to do my writing business stuff. It was still hard to get myself to do all the business-related stuff yesterday, but it wasn’t nearly as difficult as it is to try to get myself to do it on Saturdays (and so consequently I never do my writing business stuff on Saturday at all).
So, on a whole, I think it’s a good idea (so far) to allocate Mondays to do my writing business stuff. I wrote my monthly newsletter, I wrote a few blog posts and scheduled them to post later this month, I answered questions for a couple interviews I had promised to do, I did some random self-publishing and marketing things, and I posted a knitting pattern on Ravelry to get a little traffic to the pattern on my blog.
This particular week was busier than most, so it took a lot longer than I had planned, and I ended up doing some of it today, also. Total, it was a little over 10 hours across two days. However, the good news is that next week will probably be very light in terms of writing business work.
There were a couple more things I could have done today, but I was feeling a little tired mentally and I decided to just put them on my To Do list and do them some other time. One marketing task especially will be a significant amount of work—at least a couple hours—so I didn’t want to start that today, plus the deadline for that isn’t until mid September, so there’s no rush to get it done.
I’m really glad I got this writing-related business work done! Now I can do my writing work starting tomorrow without any urgent tasks hanging over my head.
Outlining: time spent: 0
Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Total number of words: n/a
Writing: Overall writing speed: n/a
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 5 hours, 19 minutes
My takeaway for today: Rather than trying to do it on Saturdays, shunting my writing business work to Mondays seems to work better to ensure I actually do it.
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