Day 817: Dictation, day 25
I had a hard time sleeping last night, and so I overslept this morning. I also have a little bit of IBS discomfort. However, I wanted to try doing my walk and dictation earlier in the day, before I did my frogs. So after breakfast, I got my digital recorder and went out.
Since I overslept, this isn't exactly early morning writing, and my brain feels pretty clear. When it's especially early in the morning, my mind is usually rather fuzzy. So I'm not sure if this could really qualify as an experiment in writing first thing in the morning. But it's the first thing I'm doing today, and I'll see how I feel, and how all my other tasks lineup throughout the rest of the day.
I think that I will continue to do an hour of marketing a day. The productivity books I have read talk about batching your work, in which you do only one type of work each day. I can't quite do that, because I have to do certain things every day, such as Japanese and checking my email. I was doing a little bit of marketing every day, simply to ensure that I got it done, because if I left it all for one day a week, I tend to procrastinate getting started doing my marketing.
But after doing a few hours of marketing yesterday, in conjunction with writing my Hawaii book, I realized that since I'm doing one or two hours on the Hawaii book, I can't really get six hours of marketing work done in one day. I simply have too many other things I need to do. Where as if I do one hour of marketing six days a week, that's six hours of marketing. If I do a couple extra hours of marketing on one of those days, that's nine or 10 hours of marketing a week.
That sounds like a lot of time to do marketing. But in looking at the amount of marketing tasks I have in my checklist, I'm beginning to think that I actually need the extra time.
What I will do is continue to do one hour of marketing every day, and then do as much marketing as I can on a designated day during the week, which is looking like it will be Thursdays. Then I can look at my marketing checklist and see how behind I am. If I get ahead, maybe I can switch things up. But I have a feeling I will never get ahead. Plus, I know I'll get more busy once I start adding advertising to my marketing checklist.
Another thing that occurred to me was that if I am able to write books faster, as I am really trying to do thanks to this dictation, then the amount of marketing work I have to do will only increase. For the past year, I haven't had a book release, and so the only marketing I've had to do is writing my newsletters and blogging. But when have book release, I have a huge checklist of things that need to be done. If I release one book every two or three months, then I have to add that large checklist to my marketing tasks every two or three months. That will naturally increase my marketing load. In which case, I may need that nine or 10 hours of marketing each week.
So I will give this a shot. One hour of marketing each day, plus 2 or three hours of marketing on Thursdays, which are the days that I think I will do my Hawaii book. I'll continue to take Sundays off of writing, except for the bare minimum in order to keep up my streak.
As I mentioned yesterday, my personal goal for now is to see how much of book 5 I can get written before September 14. If I can get half or three quarters of it done by then, then I will go ahead and put book 4 up one preorder, and then plan to release book 5 a month after that. I know that it would depend upon my health. I've been doing my best with my eating, but my IBS continues to bother me. I hope I will be able to get that under control soon. Since I have my September deadline, it motivates me to be extra strict with what I put in my mouth, because I don't want to be sick, I want to be healthy so that I can finish my book.
***
Well, while I got a lot of writing work done today, I ended up not having any time to do my other frogs except for my Japanese. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since I got started late. Something had to get pushed aside if I was going to do a full 4+ hours of writing today.
I still feel a bit guilty that I never got my frogs done. But then again, if I had done my frogs first, I probably wouldn’t have had time to do as much writing today, and I would probably have felt even worse about that.
My dictation today wasn’t great. I’m not entirely certain why, because my blocking notes were pretty good and I was trying to relax and just dictate as it came to me. But I paused a lot and kept repeating myself. My average dictation speed was below 3000 words per hour. I wonder if it had anything to do with the time of day? I’m not sure. I didn’t particularly feel like my brain was moving more slowly because it was earlier.
I’ll just have to try doing it again and try dictating in the morning. I’m sure eventually a pattern will form. In the meantime, I will just need to continue doing my dictation exercises. I haven’t been very good about them—I’m supposed to be doing short sentences, but often (like today) I forget and just do long sentences. I need to adhere to the exercise, or else what’s the point?
Writing streak: 296 days
My takeaway for today: Adhere more strictly to the dictation exercise so you can train yourself and practice, don’t just dictate whatever you feel like.
Since I overslept, this isn't exactly early morning writing, and my brain feels pretty clear. When it's especially early in the morning, my mind is usually rather fuzzy. So I'm not sure if this could really qualify as an experiment in writing first thing in the morning. But it's the first thing I'm doing today, and I'll see how I feel, and how all my other tasks lineup throughout the rest of the day.
I think that I will continue to do an hour of marketing a day. The productivity books I have read talk about batching your work, in which you do only one type of work each day. I can't quite do that, because I have to do certain things every day, such as Japanese and checking my email. I was doing a little bit of marketing every day, simply to ensure that I got it done, because if I left it all for one day a week, I tend to procrastinate getting started doing my marketing.
But after doing a few hours of marketing yesterday, in conjunction with writing my Hawaii book, I realized that since I'm doing one or two hours on the Hawaii book, I can't really get six hours of marketing work done in one day. I simply have too many other things I need to do. Where as if I do one hour of marketing six days a week, that's six hours of marketing. If I do a couple extra hours of marketing on one of those days, that's nine or 10 hours of marketing a week.
That sounds like a lot of time to do marketing. But in looking at the amount of marketing tasks I have in my checklist, I'm beginning to think that I actually need the extra time.
What I will do is continue to do one hour of marketing every day, and then do as much marketing as I can on a designated day during the week, which is looking like it will be Thursdays. Then I can look at my marketing checklist and see how behind I am. If I get ahead, maybe I can switch things up. But I have a feeling I will never get ahead. Plus, I know I'll get more busy once I start adding advertising to my marketing checklist.
Another thing that occurred to me was that if I am able to write books faster, as I am really trying to do thanks to this dictation, then the amount of marketing work I have to do will only increase. For the past year, I haven't had a book release, and so the only marketing I've had to do is writing my newsletters and blogging. But when have book release, I have a huge checklist of things that need to be done. If I release one book every two or three months, then I have to add that large checklist to my marketing tasks every two or three months. That will naturally increase my marketing load. In which case, I may need that nine or 10 hours of marketing each week.
So I will give this a shot. One hour of marketing each day, plus 2 or three hours of marketing on Thursdays, which are the days that I think I will do my Hawaii book. I'll continue to take Sundays off of writing, except for the bare minimum in order to keep up my streak.
As I mentioned yesterday, my personal goal for now is to see how much of book 5 I can get written before September 14. If I can get half or three quarters of it done by then, then I will go ahead and put book 4 up one preorder, and then plan to release book 5 a month after that. I know that it would depend upon my health. I've been doing my best with my eating, but my IBS continues to bother me. I hope I will be able to get that under control soon. Since I have my September deadline, it motivates me to be extra strict with what I put in my mouth, because I don't want to be sick, I want to be healthy so that I can finish my book.
***
Well, while I got a lot of writing work done today, I ended up not having any time to do my other frogs except for my Japanese. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since I got started late. Something had to get pushed aside if I was going to do a full 4+ hours of writing today.
I still feel a bit guilty that I never got my frogs done. But then again, if I had done my frogs first, I probably wouldn’t have had time to do as much writing today, and I would probably have felt even worse about that.
My dictation today wasn’t great. I’m not entirely certain why, because my blocking notes were pretty good and I was trying to relax and just dictate as it came to me. But I paused a lot and kept repeating myself. My average dictation speed was below 3000 words per hour. I wonder if it had anything to do with the time of day? I’m not sure. I didn’t particularly feel like my brain was moving more slowly because it was earlier.
I’ll just have to try doing it again and try dictating in the morning. I’m sure eventually a pattern will form. In the meantime, I will just need to continue doing my dictation exercises. I haven’t been very good about them—I’m supposed to be doing short sentences, but often (like today) I forget and just do long sentences. I need to adhere to the exercise, or else what’s the point?
Writing streak: 296 days
My takeaway for today: Adhere more strictly to the dictation exercise so you can train yourself and practice, don’t just dictate whatever you feel like.
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