Managing the diary

A light week last week followed by an uncluttered weekend meant I could devote some time to scheduling the diary a little more efficiently and adding a price list to these pages. I also finished another book from the Make Money From Home series and started the next one.Β 

By the end of the weekend I was resolved to diversifying the work I can do for other people. We also received some news that has resulted in both of our diaries becoming suddenly fuller over the next 6 to 8 weeks. So all of this means good diary management.

I love my diary. I’ve tried to keep an online diary, but I’m not online enough to keep it up to date. With a proper, physical desk diary, I schedule the work in once a week and then maintain it throughout the week.

From today, my working day starts at 9am and finishes at 6pm. Mornings are definitely for my own work (writing, publishing, blogging, admin), and afternoons are for client work (existing clients, job searches, book reviews, admin). I often carry on working until around 6pm after the poet has got home from work, so including it in the diary is a bit of kidology. I won’t feel like I’m doing overtime!

It also means that if I’m too lazy to get up early enough to do any of my own work, or if I faff for far too long in the morning, then I go straight to client work after dinner and it serves me right. I’m hoping that bit of kidology works too …

The weekend’s news meant I had to add some extra work to my own section today. But it meant I submitted my tax return for last year, and that had a knock-on effect of making me do my books to date for this year too. I’d fallen quite a way behind, but I’m on top of it again now, so that should be a relatively straightforward regular weekly job again now.

The unexpected finance work took up most of the morning. So with what time was left I nipped on and did the screen changes for Twee Tales Too.

After dinner, I first checked in to the content editing workroom, there was no work. I’m going to remove that one from the list this week if they continue to ignore my messages.

I checked the jobs board, and disregarded all but 5 jobs. I’ll have a think about those. However, while I was thinking, one of them went, so I must have taken far too long cogitating.

And I requested 2 new books from NetGalley to review, and one of those came through straight away.

I went through the submissions from the editing agency to weed out any jobs that were closed. Next, I went through again and weeded any out I didn’t feel I’d be able to do justice in the time I have (aka the ones I didn’t really want). And then I confirmed with the agency that the ones I was left with were still outstanding.Β 

Finally, I prepared my main pitch template and also saved the fees and the packages in a separate file so I could easily refer to them if necessary.

A new book had come in from Mister Greek at around 10am in the morning, so I grabbed and saved the files and let the client know it had arrived safely.

Then unable to keep away, I went and published that that book …Β