Admin Day – The Climb #954

Sunday 3rd October 2021

Today was largely an admin day. It just so happens that the end of this week coincides with the end of the month and the quarter.

I’ve been pretty good about having a weekly review. This idea of this is to reflect on how well the past week has gone – the highs, the lows – and then come up with any corrective action for the week ahead. It kinda works.

During a busy week, it’s very easy to forget the victories at the start of the week and only focus on the struggles left at the end. By reviewing, it does give me chance to reflect and enjoy my wins. It also helps guide my focus for the week ahead. After a low word count week the other week due to focusing on things around the house, my review gave me the direction to have a big writing push this past week.

But still, navigating week by week can sometimes feel you’re swapping from one thing you’ve not completed to another thing and back again. So I’ve tried to be better about doing monthly reviews. It’s a similar idea. Filter up all the wins and losses of the past month’s weeks, and use it to give you direction for the month ahead.

I also collect some stats. My word count gets automatically summed up from the weeks, but I’m currently gathering some social media data. I saw something on the internet on how to rank engagement and I’ve got something in Notion (that I built based on what I saw). I’ve been capturing my major social media content but I needed to go back over the past month and gather data.

In hindsight, I should probably do this weekly rather than monthly.

I still don’t know if the data I collect will show me anything, but I won’t know for sure until I stick some more data in. I also don’t know if the engagement data needs to be broken out by platform, or whether the results are not going to warrant putting a lot of effort into data collection.

I spent my evening doing a bit of discovery. I took various social media content creators across various disciplines (writing, HEMA, etc.) and looked at where their engagement is. This is very rough and ready but what I want to know is whether, for example, my HEMA content would do better on Facebook. I don’t have a lot of data yet, and I’m not sure how much more I need, but it has got me asking questions.

You might ask why worry, and that’s a very good question. I think because I’m not a natural salesman, I struggle with marketing, and with it being an ever more important part of an author’s remit, there’s part of me that feels I should keep up to date with things, even dabbling with them a little.

Of course, it’s not a priority and if it takes away from the writing then I need to readjust, but I find it interesting.

I did get some writing done, but it was a normal amount rather than anything special. That was because I was on the support sofa most of the day, and I can’t write when I have distractions around me. I can do admin though.

I ended up this week just shy of 30,000 words written and over 8000 edited. I’m quite proud of that, and I’m going to try and repeat it. Not sure how well I’ll do as part of my focus for next week is on time management and there’s likely to be a bit of studying going on.

Still, the word count has got me motivated to see if I could do more without quality dropping. I still have a lot of projects on the go, so if I could get some of those completed next week that would be good, but I’m increasingly thinking that I underestimate the time I need to do all these things.