I haven’t posted anything here in more than two months. See, back in July I fell victim to a classic problem I have: I got all excited about all the projects I had in mind, got scared about the scope, then did absolutely nothing to further any of them.

Back toward the beginning of the year I started writing a novel. It’s a story that I love, that I’ve had floating around between my ears for more than a decade. As I worked my way through the rough draft another old story popped into my head, so I started writing that during off times.

I started this blog in order to connect with the future fans of my fiction. I wanted a place to lay it all out there, hoping the fans I didn’t have (yet) would like to see into the artist’s mind. Caution, ’tis a scary place. But the hardest part about blogging, for me, is coming up with blog topics. I set an aggressive twice a week schedule and had a hard time thinking of something to write twice a week.

In the midst of all that I came up ideas for two other websites. More traditional authority sites in two different niches, I spent a bit of time brainstorming ideas for the types of things I could put up on those sites.

Activate Burn Out Mode

When I started writing a second fiction story I completely stopped writing the first. Then, when THAT story hit a dead end I quit writing it. For the last two months I have written exactly zero fiction.

Making up content ideas twice a week was a struggle. I didn’t want to post shitty writing, so I stalled. Twice weekly became bi-weekly. Then I gave up completely for two months, leading to the gap you see now.

As far as the other two websites, I mostly pretended to work. Sure I’ve got a couple of notebook pages filled with content ideas. A little brainstorming for info products. I even opened Long Tail Pro once to check out some related keywords. But if I’m honest all of that amounts to precisely ZERO actual work.

Time to Regroup

I’ll admit, I wallowed around in pity for a while. The whole “woe’s me” scenario. I didn’t think I had “it.” Whatever that thing was that lets people like the Pat Flynn or the guys at Sterling and Stone knock shit out of the park. I just didn’t have it.

Then, in a moment of complete stupidity, I started ANOTHER side gig. Two of them, actually. I opened freelancer accounts on both Odesk and Elance. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking, but it ended up not being such a bad idea.

I landed my first gig through oDesk, a freelance writing assignment writing a user manual for a website. Call me a masochist but I actually enjoy that type of writing. It didn’t pay much, but it worked MIRACLES.

See, I made money online. Quite a bit, in fact. About $1,000 in August. I took a couple of similar writing assignments, then found a more lucrative gig as a freelance CAD draftsman. Those jobs pay a bit more.

But it’s not the AMOUNT that matters. It’s the IDEA. I GOT PAID ONLINE!

Seriously, if you are like me and are having trouble with motivation go out and get a freelance gig. There’s some internal switch that flips when you realize that you really CAN make money online.

I know it lit a fire under my ass.

I decided that October would be the do or die month. This is a business, and October starts the fourth quarter. It just seemed to fit. So I started my plan with a deadline – October 1, 2014.

Then, I took a step back. A business is only ONE aspect of life. There are other factors like family and health that will take a hit if you do nothing but go balls out building a business. So I decided to re-read an old post over on the Art of Manliness – Craft the Life You Want.

The article combines aspects from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People with some other, similar work that I haven’t read to create a life plan, a roadmap for the rest of your life.

That, my friends, was probably the single best thing I’ve ever done. Now I not only have a start date, I have an end state. With those two things I can build goals and set milestones that will get me from point A to point B without any of the wandering I was doing in between.

Work The Plan

I’m still debating publishing the entire life plan in detail, but I do want to talk about the plan for the business, specifically.

I know that I want this online gig to be a source of a full time income.

Note: Honestly, I LOVE being an engineer and I don’t think I could ever stop doing that. But having a second source of income would sure be great if something were to happen to the day job.

That’s really all the more specific the plan is, and I believe that’s all the more specific it needs to be. I now know that all of my business activities need to be aligned toward that goal.

As a result of having an end in mind I was able to set up a plan for the entire 4th quarter using Asana (more on that later).

I pared my projects down to 2: this blog and Regent of Aldun. Those are the most important steps toward my goal as it relates to where I am now. Anything else will dilute the effort I can focus on those two goals.

I set up an editorial calendar. I have a blog topic assigned to every Tuesday and Thursday from here to the end of the year. Planning topics in advance I won’t be choking when it comes time to pick a topic to write about. It’s right there, already set for me.

I have two full weeks of blog content in the bank. Having banked content takes the pressure off to produce every week. If something comes up I can pull an article ahead of its scheduled time. I do want to note that the two weeks is not consecutive, that’s total. When I laid out the editorial calendar there were some topics that I didn’t feel right writing in advance.

I worked time in my calendar to write those posts when they need to be written.

On top of all that I also wrote a nearly 5,000 word, 12 part autoresponder series. Those are the automatic emails you will get if you sign up for the newsletter. Having a bank of emails ready to go takes the pressure off to produce a newsletter from scratch each week. The plan is to go in and tweak before they go out, but it sure as hell beats writing off the cuff.

The overall goal is to put the blog on a sort of auto pilot. By planning and working ahead my immediate time is free to write fiction, namely Regent of Aldun. I have a plan for that too. The rough draft is scheduled to be complete in time for the start of National Novel Writing Month, so I can go into November writing a NEW book.

There’s Still Work To Do

I want to emphasize the phrase I used above: a SORT of autopilot. The stuff you’re reading now was scheduled in advance (admittedly only a day in advance for this article) but there’s a TON of stuff that needs to be written for future posts.

I STILL need to write each and every day in order to keep up. The difference is that by having a plan and taking the time to work ahead I take some of the HOLY SHIT I HAVE A POST DUE feeling out of my life.

And that’s a good feeling.

A Final Thought

In order to hold myself accountable for keeping up the pace, I’ve signed up for Jeff Goins’ My 500 Word challenge. Jeff is one of the few bloggers I read regularly. He deals a lot with forming good habits and writing as a business, two of my favorite topics.

It’s generally accepted that you need to repeat a task for AT LEAST 30 days in a row in order to make it a habit. The challenge is simple: write 500 words every day for 31 days.

500 words is definitely an attainable goal. I’m at 1400 words for this post after about an hour of writing. The point is to JUST DO IT. Sit down. Put in the words. The habit will come.

If you’re interested in the challenge you can get to Jeff’s blog by clicking the image.

Thanks for reading.

photo credit: .Bala via photopin cc