Productivity Fairy Tales
You know how in fairy tales, there’s always someone who is cursed? And like, the curse itself is kind of weird?
Like how Sleeping Beauty was going to die from pricking her finger on a spinning wheel? Or like how Pinocchio’s nose grows when he lies?
Admittedly, I’m not dealing with any of this.
But I have been cursed by busy-ness, an odd thing since I wrote about how busy is a choice years ago.
But sometimes, when life shifts and you level up, what used to be a necessary task falls into the busy realm. Couple that with my need to constantly appear like I have it all together (this is a pathological thing, and I’m working on it because I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE IT ALL TOGETHER), and well, you’ve got a girl who has been doing tons of busy work.
Also, if I’m being real, I set goals every year for the stuff I want to do. And when you write it on paper, it always feels smaller than it is. I don’t imagine myself, bleary-eyed and anxious, sitting at the computer for an extra couple of hours every week to make it happen, though I should.
Here’s what I’m getting at:
I love my blog, but it’s busy work.
I love #FlashFictionFriday, but it’s busy work.
I love sharing info on my YouTube channel, but it’s busy work.
I love writing Medium essays, but those are also busy work.
None of these things are novel writing. None of these things are paying off in the way that they should for the amount of energy I put into them. None of these things make me feel particularly accomplished.
Sure, I get to mark these off the to do list each week, and at the end of the year, there’s a whole pile of things I did.
But when I compare that pile to the list of things that sit unfinished, it kills me a little.
So, even though I’m busy, it doesn’t mean that I’m productive, because so much goes undone.
This past week, Alexandra Franzen sent out a newsletter called Busy vs. Brave. In it, she talked about the difference between busy and brave work. Busy work is the little things we do that occupy our time. They don’t make a big difference. They take a short amount of time, but don’t let us do the real things we need to do.
Basically, they get in the way of the brave work.
And for me, brave work is writing novels. It’s creating courses so I can share the information I have with a wider audience. It’s speaking my mind and sharing values and ethics that actually matter. It’s going against the grain in my industry.
So, that’s what I’ll be doing more of.
Here’s what this is going to look like:
For the foreseeable future, I won’t be adhering to any set blogging or video schedule. I will still be sharing, but when it’s important to do so.
Posting regularly and keeping an editorial calendar did wonders for me. It’s how I built up an audience. It’s how I got speaking gigs. It’s how I kept my sanity while I worked at a day job that sucked my soul out of my ears.
It was a lifeline when I needed. It kept me on the path I needed to walk when I was overwhelmed by the idea that I would never get to build the life I wanted.
But things have changed.
Now, I want to share important and big things. I want to be able to do more research. I want to create one-of-a-kind content. I want to get off the hamster wheel.
So know that the blog, YouTube channel, Medium, and #FlashFictionFriday aren’t dead. But they’re evolving to match the type of writer I want to be.
I’ll still be writing and creating content, but only when I have something really important to say and not a long tail keyword I want to target to get you on my email list.
And perhaps this flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Perhaps people will think I’m going to lose momentum. To which, I say, show me another writer out there who has adhered to an editorial calendar the way I have. Show me another writer who can put out that much content in the course of a week (for reference, that’s one blog post, one Medium essay, two videos, and a flash fiction story) and still make progress on the work they do.
I’m not bragging here. I’m only illustrating how absolutely relentless I am in this pursuit. I’m like a big ol’ junkyard dog that just bit down, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting go.
So, with that in mind, know that I’m abandoning the posting schedule so I can sink my teeth deeper into work that matters. Work that makes money. Work that I can actually be proud of.
Some of that work includes:
- an author platform building bundle that will be launching soon
- an editorial calendar planner for authors to use to build their online platform
- a mega bundle of 3 eCourses designed to help writers follow their intuition and write their novel while maintaining work-life balance and building their online platform
- a novel called The Paper Man about a Mexican single mom in Edmond, Oklahoma, and her quest to find out who murdered her best friend 25 years ago
- a new system of taking what you love and building a novel outlining structure from it.
Y’all. I’ve got so many things I want to bring you. But I know with the way my brain works, I can’t keep stopping and starting on them. I can’t keep setting them aside to write a blog post and format the images and schedule the social media.
And I need to be less scattered too, because it will make it easier for me to share who I am and what I’m actually about.
It’s also time for me to be a bit more strategic.
I have been incredibly foolish, and have managed to create new content for every single platform. It’s time to repurpose, gang. It’s time for me to re-use some of the stuff I’ve created and share it elsewhere.
The internet is a big place, and it’s a lot of non-stop stuff coming at you. That means most people aren’t seeing what I’ve created in one place, because they’ve been drinking from the firehose. So, it’s with that in mind that I’ll be putting more of the same main ideas in different places so the message gets a little clearer.
I’m excited gang. It feels like a fresh start halfway through the year.
Keep a weather eye out, gang. Your girl is building a damn empire.
