Friday, February 21, 2020

Projects and Processes


As you know, DH and I own our own business. We utilize a very complicated application to manage clients, our schedules, time entries--pretty much everything that happens is supposed to happen or be tracked in that software.

It also has a feature that allows you to plan large projects. You can break projects into phases and then create tasks/tickets for various steps of each phase.

Anyway, I've been less than diligent about most self-publishing related tasks. At least in terms of maintaining and refreshing previously released books. Other things too, such as better planning and plotting. But not things like advertising or promotion. I do very little of that by choice, although there are some things I do do and other I should do. I'm not getting to the level of several writers I know because that's just not me or part of my plan.

But we've been talking a lot in the day job about utilizing the application to more of its fullest, about following procedures, about creating project plans to stay on track, and the subsequent tasks/tickets in order to not only schedule them, but keep track of the time worked on them.

In addition to that, I have online friends with whom I hang out pretty much every day. A couple of them are full-time writers and they talk often about planning out various aspects of being said full-time writers that aren't the actual writing. Newsletters and blog posts and admin stuff. They plan that stuff, put it on their calendars.

So between the two conversations, I keep thinking that I need to be a little more proactive about things and sooooo...it's my intention and hope that I can make those plans in advance. If that's the case, I might need an application similar to the one at work...

Remember my bullet journal? Yeah, that lasted all of two weeks. The composition book is back to being just a composition book. Sigh. At first I thought a physical book would work better for me, but I've really been leaning in to being virtual and/or going green and reducing my paper usage. Maybe an online/electronic/virtual helper will be better. I did a quick Google search, read some articles with pros and cons. But will have to test some out I guess.

Anyway, it's Friday--hope you have an awesome weekend.



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