It’s the end of week 3 of my 52 weeks of accountability, and, as predicted, it was tough to stay on track even with the very light workload I had.
From Last Week
So I think I have to be smart about next week, and set a single goal in order to not get frazzled and break this chain. And that goal will be to just read as much as possible, at least an hour every morning. My priority is to give myself a chance to rest—to be done with work earlier in the day and have a few hours to unwind.
Looking at my fancy new tracking spreadsheet (more on that later), I can see that I spent close to 4 hours this week doing what I planned above, but it was on two consecutive mornings, rather than spread throughout the week.
And frankly, with how busy this week has been (work deadlines, appointments, and a full social calendar (after which I’ll have to recharge my social batteries for a week)), I’m calling it a win.
I haven’t finished even the first book I was reading for market research yet, though. I’ll give myself until the end of the month to speed things up, because I want to start plotting soon.
The Real Obstacles Were the Things We Made Up Along the Way
While browsing some author groups, I came across this AMAZING writing/productivity tracking spreadsheet made by RJ Blain. But after being impressed with it for a while and inputting data from my own, very bare-bones spreadsheet, I realized that it doesn’t really fit my needs because it doesn’t track hours—and I need that to be able to gauge how much I’m realistically getting done and make future planning easier when I know how many free hours I have at my disposal.
So…as any normal person would do, I spent 10 hours this week making my own spreadsheet, inspired by RJ Blain’s. It tracks hours across different areas of an author’s business (such as writing, revision, research, marketing, social media etc. though all the categories can be edited), and the projects track word counts. You can check it out here, and if you’d like to use it, just click on File > Make a Copy. Happy tracking!
Next Week’s Outlook and Goals
Next week I am planning to do my reading in the mornings Mon-Thu, and take Friday for further unpacking the WPP stack courses, and I want to start going through Publishing Mastermind Course again. But, I’m also expecting to be pretty tired after this week, so if only reading gets done, that’ll be fine by me.
Let’s see what happens! In the meantime, tell me all about your writing goals and achievements. I could use some motivation and sharing in the joy.
Love,
Jane
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