Create a Time Management Plan – Platform Challenge – Day 23

Robert Lee Brewer’s platform challenge assignment for yesterday was to create a time management plan. He believes that we must manage our time so we can remain connected on our social networks and still spend the majority of our time writing.

I have been fully aware of this ever since I retired from my day job in April 2010 and plunked myself in my chair at my home office and began my life as a full-time writer. Even though I allow myself a lot of time to write, I find myself wandering every so often to look at my email, check my Facebook comments and likes, see if anything is happening here at Choices, and respond to Twitter messages and retweets. I feel if I’m going to participate in the social media at all it’s a matter of give and take. If someone gives to me, I have to give back.

View from my office 

Just now I found a comment on an article that went live yesterday. If someone was generous enough to make a comment on my piece, I had to write a thank you right away, didn’t I?

Well, no. It could have waited. Like Robert, I’m going to reward myself with fifteen to thirty minutes of social media time after I finish each piece of writing I’ve assigned myself for the day. My assignments for today are:

• Finish and submit a piece for the Journeys through Grief  newsletter – Check
• Write poems for the PAD challenge – since I didn’t respond to yesterday’s prompt, I had to write two poems today – Check
• Post a blog piece on my Red Room page – that was easy, I posted a piece I had written for this blog – Check
• Write a new Choices blog piece – I’m doing that now.
• Reread and edit my piece for PsychAlive and get it ready to send off.
• Work on my novel – I try to write 300 to 500 words a day, and so far I’ve been successful at it.

That’s about three to five hours of work right there, so I have precious little time for social media. Right away I know I have to limit my social media breaks to no more than fifteen minutes each – at least for today. And really that’s plenty.

I could also consider a shorter writing assignment list for each day. Actually that will happen almost automatically. My April platform and PAD challenge participation will end at the end of this month, so I’ll have more free time almost right away. And once I submit my two or three regular monthly articles, I don’t have to worry about those for a few weeks.

So my workload varies. What I need to do is write down what I have on my plate each day, and then check the boxes as I finish each task. I can then reward myself with some social media time as I check that finished box. I think that’s all the time management I’m going to do. It’s not rocket science. 

Check-in

My garden Buddha says it all

I remember sitting in a circle every morning at an Esalen workshop with everyone in turn giving a one-word check-in assessment of where we are with the day or anything else on our minds. So if I were to give one word for today’s check-in I could say “busy.” However, a better word is “successful.”

I’d say my WOW blog tour is going very well http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/ . Almost every day is full between June 6, the launch date, and July 1, the last day. If I don’t have a guest blog out there somewhere, a blogger is posting a review of my book. I feel that they are all doing a very caring job. The woman today asked that all who comment learn about bipolar disorder, and she also gave statistics about suicide. Hopefully this tour will help sell books though it’s certainly hard to tell at this point. Last week my rank was number seven in books sold under bipolar at Amazon. Today it is number eight-seven. I really have no idea what that means. Another success is that two more five-star reviews went up on Amazon.

My article, Keeping Fit After Seventy, for Huffington Post’s That’s Fit page is a success way beyond my expectations. http://www.thatsfit.com/2011/06/09/keeping-fit-after-70/ It  was just dropped off the three most popular list after a week on it, moving up from third to first spot. I am definitely stoked. People “Liked “it, tweeted it, copied it and left over forty comments. Most were great, and a few not so great. I’m glad that so many folks bothered to write a comment at all. Many women my age feel as I do about keeping fit though one person 74-yeear-old told me to get a life. Another said she got her exercise doing her housework and running after her grandchildren. Well, I do have a life outside of exercise – in fact if I didn’t workout I wouldn’t have as good a life as I do. And if I had any grandchildren I would gladly run after them instead. One woman said she joined Red Room http://www.redroom.com/user/madeline40 as a result of my article. That was a huge and welcomed surprise.

The lesson here is that I can be successful writing about something other than bipolar and suicide. It makes me want to go back to my novel. The only thing I haven’t been doing much of lately relative to my writing is poetry. I can’t seem to get anything going there. I’ve used a couple of Robert Lee Brewer’s prompts http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/ lately and done reasonably well with them, but I seem to be having a little bit of a poetry block right now.

Speaking of, my book was mentioned in Robert’s round up this week https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/1307d7c33e3feccc

and it was the featured book on #bookhashtags http://bookhashtags.com on Wednesday. It’s also in the International Women’s Writers Guild http://iwwg.org newsletter this month. So the word is getting out there slow but sure. As my publisher says, “Whoopee!”