On Monday, I woke up early and was like, "yep, I got this."
I had my first call with my new (and first ever) mastermind group, coming away from the call with some good ideas and renewed focus. I then stood at my computer from about 8am until 2pm, and sent out 30ish personalized pitches to mainstream media. By the time 2pm rolled around, I could barely speak I was so tired, but it felt good: I know that getting some mainstream media coverage for our first book is key to our strategy for our second book, and I made a substantial start. In other words, I was #nailingit.
And then Tuesday happened. I had a FOMO moment, and joined like 15 blogger groups on Facebook and another 5 or so Adult Coloring Facebook groups, wasting hours looking at things that ultimately, aren't at all important to the success of our business. It's what this article would call playing business, vs. moving the business forward. Wednesday wasn't much better. I got bogged down in Gmail land, and I don't know if I really accomplished anything that would either a) sell more books, b) get us media coverage, or c) help us move forward with our strategy.
In other words, I made some stupid decisions this week.
So the bad news is I wasted two days of solid, impact-making work.
But there's also a lot of good news. For one, our book celebrated it's one month birthday this week, and sales are steady!
But even better, we suddenly have a tonne friends in town. People who've we known online or in-person, who are growing businesses themselves, and want somewhere to chill for a few months. And that means we have people to talk to and bounce ideas off of who've experienced a lot of the problems we're having.
Also, it's a lot of fun.
And so after having not-so-great days, business wise, on Tuesday and Wednesday, we shut down our laptops and met friends at the quesadilla lady (Tuesday) and tlayuda family (Wednesday) in the evenings. I talked to people, asked questions, and listened.
And I realized time management is a huge issue for me when I'm only accountable to myself*, and I am easily tempted by "playing business."
(*I am of course accountable to Geoff, too, but we've split up duties, and don't check in on business things every day. He trusts me to get my part done and move things forward, which is awesome, but also scary).
So here's what I'm doing about it:
- I'm going write out a one-page business plan. Our strategy crystallized in our minds this week when we had an amazing call with a friend who gave us some great advice, but we don't have anything on paper that I can check back against when I'm tempted to play business. I need some written priorities, that I can check against when I'm trying to decide how to spend my time.
- I'm going to define how much time I'm willing to spend per week on each thing I'm responsible for: blogging, social media, influncer relations, media relations, creating our next book, building brand partnerships, etc. It's all getting a time limit.
- I'm going to change my relationship with email by closing my Gmail tab except for set times in the morning and mid-day, when I get scheduled time sensitive emails. All other emails are going to get dealt with in the evenings, when I'm in need of brain dead and repetitive tasks.
And most of all, I'm going to keep things in perspective. Sales seem to be on an upswing, which hopefully means our efforts are paying off. And at the end of the day, we're travelling the world creating colouring books and meeting awesome people!
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