Time Management Tuesday: Time To Recapitulate

Yes, people, it's time for my annual ritual of recapitulation, which I learned about, as I do so many things, in an issue of Yoga Journal. I've modified YJ's plan, so I won't be feeling remorse and letting it go or creating a list of negative thoughts that I'll then tear up. What I will be doing is assessing how well I did at meeting my goals this past year before creating more for next year.

So let's see how I did.

Goal 1. Adhere to Goals and Objectives

Objectives:

• Plan goal work for each month, making sure that each goal gets some attention each quarter.
• Continue weekly checks of goals. 

ASSESSMENT: The planning goal work thing I don't believe I did even once. I'm going to try something similar but different next year. The weekly check of goals I did keep up with, and it's been fantastic. That will be another post sometime.

Goal 2. Prepare Mummy Hunters for Submission

Objectives:

• Complete revision of paper draft
• Prepare synopsis
• Prepare cover letter
• Submit to first four agents
• Prepare for next round of submissions

ASSESSMENT: Happy with this one. I submitted to two agents, did another revision, and have submitted to at least one editor.

Goal 3. Generate New Short Work/Programs

Objectives

• Prepare Writing Strategies workshops for school appearance at beginning of March. Set aside time each week in January and February for this.
• Prepare articles using material from last year's workshop submissions. Set aside time each week after Writing Strategies is completed.
• Complete at least one short story, using the weekly time set aside for new work/programs.
• Essay possibilities: The workshop slide change; my love for my iphone

ASSESSMENT: Well, I did the workshop. I wrote one flash essay. And I submitted it. So that's all I have on these objectives. I did a number of other submissions of short work, though. There's that, though I didn't have an objective for it. I will have a submission goal with objectives next year.

Goal 4. Marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook

Objectives

• Look into taking book down from Barnes & Noble and Kobo to take advantage of Kindle. marketing for books exclusive to that company.
• Look into the expense involved with printing a paper edition. (This would involved negotiating with the cover artist, since our contract only involves a digital edition.)
• If I move to Amazon KDP Select, plan some Twitter promotion, maybe in relation to Earth Day month
• Collect names of some authors who might be interested in doing a Christmas eBook promotion this year. 

ASSESSMENT: Ah...er...I did take the book down from B&N and Kobo and did one Kindle marketing thing. I promoted it on Twitter. I have a goal with objectives in mind for next year.

Goal 5. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding 

Objectives

Janet Lawler Colchester library appearance

• Continue with writers' group
• Continue with Original Content
• January--Cybils judging
• Check out NESCBWI spring conference, with possibility of attending
• Check out NESCBWI-PAL offerings this year, with possibility of attending
• Look into starting Instagram account (I have a plan.)
• Attend other authors' appearances, as I did last year
• Continue with (and keep better track of time used on) promoting Original Content at Google+, Facebook communities, Goodreads' blog, and Twitter
• Continue reviewing environmental books at Amazon
• Research markets for short work.
• Do at least two updates for my website, one this month relating to my work for the Cybils and the new workshop I'm developing and another after the school appearance date, when I will post a workshop description.

ASSESSMENT: Did well on this one, though I haven't been doing much with environmental books. Instead of Instragram I did Pinterest. Which is not very useful for writers, though it's fun.

Goal 6. Generate New Work: Revise Adult Version of Becoming Greg and Emma

Objective:

• Summer or fall

ASSESSMENT: Did well on this one. I finished the revision and got feed back from beta readers. I also finished a picture book and began submitting it.  In November I restarted a project I began during National Novel Writing Month in 2004. So I'm working on another adult manuscript. Both these manuscripts will figure prominently in next year's goals, as will the picture book.

Overall Assessment Of My Year

I was a little chagrined when I went over these goals last week. I had been feeling pretty good about this year, and then I saw how little I did for Goals 3 and 4. However:

• Marketing the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook shouldn't be as high a priority as generating new work at this point. It's been out in the world for a few years. My marketing efforts now are experiments and training for marketing future work.
• Generating new book-length children's fiction like The Mummy Hunters and Trouble at Wee Play World is higher priority than generating new short adult pieces, because, remember, I'm a children's writer.
• In addition, I did some significant work on adult full-length manuscripts, which will mean a whole new world of submitting.

Next year's goals and objectives will definitely build on what I did and didn't do last year. Stay tuned.

Time Management Tuesday: A Gardening Model

I've written a lot here, and I mean a lot, about working with units of time. I've gone on and on about working in forty-five minute units. And I've written about working in month-long units.  I don't think I've considered a year-long unit, planning work for a whole year or around the seasons. That's what gardeners do, or so I've been told. They practice a form of of situational time management, with the requirements of the season determining how they'll spend their time.

You see any grass? No.

To be honest, I don't actually know much about gardening. Like Buffy, we live on the Hellmouth. The soil around here has been scorched by Satan and his minions. Grass does not grow. It can't. The ground cover we bought to plant on a bald spot got the blight. Landscaping stones don't stay put in these parts. It's as if they're alive.

But when I stumbled upon a copy of C.Z. Guest's 5 Seasons of Gardening at my local library book sale earlier this month, even I was reminded that real gardeners do certain things at certain times. C.Z. Guest was a socialite gardener who maintained gardens at her multiple homes. At one of them, she grew vegetables for her French chef. Do not be put off because Guest thinks there are 5 seasons when there are only 4. (She includes Christmas.) In spite of her wealth and rather over-the-top blue blood lifestyle, she couldn't bend nature to her will. She, or maybe someone she paid, had to work with it.

The Blight

Writers Who Use A Gardening Model

For the most part, writers who use a gardening model, working around specific situations in their year, are responding to work and/or family restrictions. For instance:

• Writers who teach on any level may plan to use school vacations to do their heavier writing work, such as generating new writing or doing a big revision.

• Writers who do freelance work and can control the number and kinds of jobs they do, can plan writing around the times of year when they are less likely to have big freelance obligations.

  

  It Lives! It Lives!

  
  

• Writers who are primary caregivers for young children may  plan lighter work loads for school vacations  or plan marketing tours or travel research that they can do with children when they're out of school. This could also be a good time to plan to do small social media tasks--updating websites or blogs--that can be completed in short periods of time.

However, even full-time writers may think seasonally/annually.

• Writers who do a lot of public appearances and workshop teaching sometimes create blocks of time each year when they don't do that kind of work so they can write.

• For children's writers who work regularly in schools, the school year is a significant period, almost seasonal in nature.

• Some full-time writers who presumably can write any time still use National Novel Writing Month as a tool for getting new books started.

For the past couple of years, I've treated April as Earth Day Month, a specific time for marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff. September is a travel month (which has to be prepared for, by the way) when I do professional reading. As I've mentioned recently, I'm thinking of doing NaNoWriMo this year. I'll need to be prepping for that during most of the fall season.

 

Gardeners cannot change the coming and going of the seasons and what happens during them. They have to plan what they can do within those periods. For writers, it's the same thing. We can't change our family responsibilities or ignore the fact that we work with all kinds of restraints. We can do long-term planning for working around and with those restraints, though.

 

We are not quite halfway through the calendar year. This would be a good time to think about what you could be doing "seasonally" through December. Can you plan to work on specific 2016 goals/objectives at different points the rest of this year?     

Time Management Tuesday: Goals And Objectives For 2016

Last week in my 2015 Recapitulation Post you learned that I did not make good use of my 2015 goals and objectives. So one of my goals this year will be to do better. Otherwise, my goals are pretty much the same as last year, though objectives are often different. I'm also doing more with giving myself time frames for some of the objectives.

For anyone new just dropping by: I just want to point out that goals are what one hopes to achieve, objectives are the tasks necessary to achieve them. What you're going to do, how you're going to do it. A goal without objectives is a lot like a New Year's resolution. It leaves you with no idea how you're going to do what you want to do.

Goal 1. Adhere to Goals and Objectives 

Objectives:

• Plan goal work for each month, making sure that each goal gets some attention each quarter.
• Continue weekly checks of goals. 

Goal 2. Prepare Mummy Hunters for Submission

Objectives:

• Complete revision of paper draft
• Prepare synopsis
• Prepare cover letter
• Submit to first four agents
• Prepare for next round of submissions

Goal 3. Generate New Short Work/Programs

   

Objectives

• Prepare Writing Strategies workshops for school appearance at beginning of March. Set aside time each week in January and February for this.
• Prepare articles using material from last year's workshop submissions. Set aside time each week after Writing Strategies is completed.
• Complete at least one short story, using the weekly time set aside for new work/programs.
• Essay possibilities: The workshop slide change; my love for my iphone

Goal 4. Marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook

Objectives

• Look into taking book down from Barnes & Noble and Kobo to take advantage of Kindle. marketing for books exclusive to that company.
• Look into the expense involved with printing a paper edition. (This would involved negotiating with the cover artist, since our contract only involves a digital edition.)
• If I move to Amazon KDP Select, plan some Twitter promotion, maybe in relation to Earth Day month
• Collect names of some authors who might be interested in doing a Christmas eBook promotion this year. 

Goal 5. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

These were separate goals last year. I'm lumping them together, because community building is marketing. It's warm and fuzzy and makes marketing/branding connections at the same time.

Objectives

• Continue with writers' group
• Continue with Original Content
• January--Cybils judging
• Check out NESCBWI spring conference, with possibility of attending
• Check out NESCBWI-PAL offerings this year, with possibility of attending
• Look into starting Instagram account (I have a plan.)
• Attend other authors' appearances, as I did last year
• Continue with (and keep better track of time used on) promoting Original Content at Google+, Facebook communities, Goodreads' blog, and Twitter
• Continue reviewing environmental books at Amazon
• Research markets for short work.
• Do at least two updates for my website, one this month relating to my work for the Cybils and the new workshop I'm developing and another after the school appearance date, when I will post a workshop description.

Goal 6. Generate New Work: Revise Adult Version of Becoming Greg and Emma 

Objective:

• Summer or fall