I was looking forward to doing some incredible things this summer. Unfortunately, life tossed one of the largest monkey wrenches I've ever seen into the cogs, grinding a lot of my progress to a screeching halt. But hey, it happens.
Not everything is going to go according to plan.
Success has a lot to do with how you persevere when things go south. Will you throw in the towel and give up, or do you work that much harder next time around? Personally, I choose to learn from those moments to help increase the chances of success for the next attempt.
Sure, covid and client work slowed my personal projects, which was quite unavoidable. However, there were several things I could have done in June and July that would have helped me along with everything else.
So, with it being July 29th and a new month starting on Monday, let's make some new goals for the month and see if we can turn things around.
Experiments, Challenges, and Case Studies
I like writing experiments and case studies because they give me actionable data regarding my career path. Things like what blog posts work best or what writing platform brings in the most cash help sculpt what I plan to do next.
For example, would my time be better spent writing for Vocal, Medium, or Hubpages? How many blog posts do I need to write to generate "X" amount of visitors? Which "expert" strategies are actually good to use?
Challenges, on the other hand, are what have propelled my career forward the most. I've been pushing myself to improve since I started writing in 2012. The end result has been an awesome career, enough money to buy my house, and the freedom to do a lot of things I enjoy. But I know I could always do more.
In August, I'm going to do a few short-term challenges to get the ball rolling again.
Better Utilization of Time
I was on a pretty good roll in July for time management...until I got covid. So, I'm going to attempt to improve efficiency once again. This time, I shouldn't have anything thrown in my way to screw things up.
With how chaotic my life is at any given moment, though, I'm not holding my breath.
That's perhaps one of the most difficult things about working from home...it's easy to get distracted. Especially if you have a house full of kids. Then you have things like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, video games, or friends who want to go out for coffee or do some shopping.
Sure, some things are unavoidable and need to be addressed as they happen. But how much of your time is spent wasted on watching random TikTok videos? Thanks to the spreadsheet I use to track time, I know exactly how much time I waste.
Staying On Track to Break 2021's Total Word Count
Currently, I'm on track to shatter last year's record of total word count. I have a secondary goal of hitting more than one million, but I'm definitely hitting well over 700k for the year.
This is actually quite a difficult record to break nowadays. Several years ago, it was quite easy to go beyond two million words per year as my day was mostly spent writing for clients on content mills. Today, I'm more of an editor, team manager, and researcher. This means I don't get to write nearly as often as I used to. At least, when it comes to my clients, anyway.
In any case, I'm on track to write more this year despite having family issues at the beginning and having to deal with covid for a week and a half. Since I plan on having my book published in the next couple of months, that's just going to rack up the numbers even further.
Finishing Kingmaker's First Draft
I've been working on Kingmaker as often as I can. I rewrote a chapter earlier this week to make the story flow a bit better and plan on doing some work on it this weekend. I would still love to have a Halloween publishing date, but I'll have to see how everything goes. I don't want to rush the story.
This is what happens when your life is chaotic. It gets difficult to squirrel away any meaningful amount of time to work on a novel. It seems I spend a lot of time putting out brush fires for clients. Though, there are times when I get sucked into the weird areas of YouTube.
Yet, working on time management will vastly make a difference in how much I actually get to work on my next book. So, everything above kind of culminates into publishing Kingmaker sooner rather than later.
As long as I can keep up the momentum, that is.
What Are Your Goals for August?
July was a wash, mainly thanks to covid. So, I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do in August. I have some ideas brewing, some challenges ready to go, and I'm really looking forward to quality time with Kingmaker. Let's see if we can make this coming month something epic for ourselves.
What kind of writing goals are you planning for in August?