Another Sunday blog post underway, granted this time I had a few quick win items to knock out first. Starting this at 8:41 and am going to be diligent in using Clockify to fully track how long this takes assuming I keep very focused.
The goal with increasing my writing focus will correlate to what will end up being a new weekend routine. I will be giving a go at long-form blog/content writing for Pearl Lemon, so by tracking this I can prepare myself to start these tasks this upcoming Friday. I get extra Todd help Friday-Sunday, so I will be able to go sit in another room, not tend to his needs, and just be able to simply write.
I am estimating that it would take me 45 minutes to an hour to write 1500 words. The long form content will need to be 3-7k words. So if I aim on the higher end, excluding any necessary research, it would take 4 hours of writing to hit close to 6k words, assume another hour for research and 30 minutes for editing, I could get a full piece out in one day, or two days spread if I have additional tasks to do on top of that.
This is an exciting development for me as I thoroughly enjoy writing and research for writing. Enough that I debated choosing a major that correlated with writing or journalism. I don’t remember why I went a different route, but honestly I am on my fourth major and debated a good ten others at least.
This week I have started using Clockify religiously, day 1 I did not track my “admin” type items, checking email, messages, making help looms, sending emails etc, but day 2 I did and decided this will be included because depending the day this can take up to 45 minutes of my day. My goal is to be able to do 35+ hours a week, which I think is going to end up being a low/mid estimate. 5 hours on Saturday and Sunday, then up to 6 hours, but more than 5.5 hours each weekday will let me sit at 37.5-40 hours each week.
The above weekly dash shows time worked so far this week with it having Sunday as the last day. It isn’t too bad with having an off day for birthday time and another simply off day that had a migraine drive me to lay on the floor for 4 hours thus snatching 2-3 that I would have been working.
I still have my hands everywhere in the company’s brands, but gears are starting to turn more towards specialization. This, I feel, will be a good change of pace for me. I often feel like I know a wide spread of things but at a general level. By being able to start to hone in on 2-3 of our brands (eventually) and certain tasks I will be able to gain more skill in those and have more of a varying personal knowledge base.
Today I have a massive list, but most items fall under 30 minutes each with a few that I will spend a smidge over an hour on. The goal today though is to pull 6+ hours with work. Yesterday I took a full day off for Todd’s 2nd Birthday. I still managed 2 hours worth of work, but at 6 hours today that will put my week at 34 hours.
Clockify has been a big game changer in my routine. The first few days let me set bars, but now it has created an internal competition to beat previous times and be able to do more, at the same or better quality, in the same amount of time as before.
This week I also finally finished up all the conversions for the 52K series going from rich text over to drag and drop. That is a huge time saver for me given doing 3 could take up to 45 minutes depending on how many pictures or links there were to get transferred over fully. I also spent a little over 6 hours taking a course on selling on Amazon.
This week has also had my “typical” menagerie of tasks though too. Things like blog post editing, time stamps, profile optimisation, and research tasks for Daylee.io and task management software.
For now I am going to hurry and wrap this up. I am watching the clock as I type and I am in a definite writing mood so feel I am going faster or maybe by doing this post an hour after coffee I am awake enough to focus while writing.
That is all for this Sunday. All of my writing and edits have taken 24 minutes and 10 seconds before posting. Picking up the pace 😉