No More 9-5! Day 1 of Freedom :-)
Well it’s not really my first day as I’ve spent 7 years self employed, but it’s my first day this time around :-) Last week I was so full of excitement but I did such a good job of planning exactly what I was going to do with my time that today has felt totally normal, which is weird, in a “this should be weird but isn’t” kind of way!
Day One Cleanup Work
I started out by just dealing with the administrative annoyances that arise when you quit your job, like ensuring my student loan stops, that my gym membership is canceled, clearing out a backlog of paperwork that was overdue and making lots of irritating phone calls. May as well get all that boring stuff out of the way so it’s not hanging over me.
I had a pretty clear idea of exactly what I wanted to get done today and what could be left until later. One of the problems with starting a business pretty much from scratch rather than transitioning to it from part-time basis is that there are just so many things I want to do but I had to hold back. I can’t do it ALL on day one.
Getting Started on the Most Important Projects
In the past I have been guilty of procrastination, of never really getting started on anything, much less getting finished. I have several key projects that I have identified as being important for the coming week or two so I made sure I made headway on those where appropriate.
Twitter Guide
The most important job that I wanted to get started on today was my Twitter Guide that I’m writing for this blog. This is going to be big and as such I’m splitting it into multiple parts. I will wait until the whole thing is written before I begin publishing it so it is unlikely to appear until next week. I’m amazed at just how much there is to say about a tool that seems so delightfully simple upon first glance.
The 3 Niche Experiment
Until today all I had time for was research. In my last update I had clarified what my 3 niches were, what keyword phrases I was going to be targeting and what products I was going to sell. Today I was able to dive into content creation, kind of! I’ve started to rifle through the various content sources that I have gathered and I’m ready to start writing for one of the niches but I’m still a bit hazy on the other two at the moment. I’ll post an update on this in a day or two.
Dynamic Tool for the Blog
Last week I had an idea for a cool feature that I’d like to add to the blog. It’s mainly for my own personal use but it’s something that others may find useful and I haven’t seen anyone else doing it yet so I may as well try and go ahead with it. This is extra work that I hadn’t originally planned for so I deliberately held back on this for today and I’ll begin investigating the details later in the week.
Blog Commenting
A few days ago I posted my plan for world domination, um blog commenting :-) I spent a little over an hour doing this I managed to clear the backlog on three blogs but I didn’t really find much worthy of a comment – just a single post I think! Part of the problem is that I have a backlog and I only want to comment on recent posts so a large chunk of the time will initially be spent just catching up. However, that’s a short term problem.
More Blogging
I spent over three hours writing content for the blog today. An hour was spent on the Twitter Guide and then whilst I was working on content for my niches I found myself revisiting the problem of social networking profiles for niche marketing. Whilst the topic was fresh in my mind I just started writing and I now have myself a post all ready to go out tomorrow. I’ve also written two posts for today, phew!
I’m not intending to spend three hours blogging every day but the beauty of having all my time to spend as I please is that it allows me to write when the mood takes me and save work up until later. I am away this coming weekend and won’t be able to write but if I have worked well during the week I’ll have a small stockpile of posts ready to go and using Wordpress’ time stamp feature I can just schedule a post to be published while I’m away.
All in all a good start to my new career… and don’t worry I’m not going to be posting a “here’s what I did today” post every day, this is just a one off :-)
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Caroline,
you left out the most important part!
The feeding of the rabbits!
Even in your new role as CEO, COO, CFO and CTM you still found time for the furry people next door!
I’m sure even Ed would say that was “Hay gann, supar ecological. Ga’day”
PS Hope your new boss doesn’t work y too hard!
Peter
Caroline,
I was reading a lot of Books about getting things done and maybe this sentence will help you as much as it helped me:
“The key to the freedom – is discipline”
At a first glance this sentence ist pointles, beacuse if you have to discipline your self, your are not realy free, instead you are like in cage of our plan or activities. but if you will thing about it a little bit longer, it ist very trouth.
If you have enough discipile, you can achiev everything you want. and that makes you free.
It can be used on business, blogging or whatever, but that sentence is grate.
@Lernen, I half agree. You need to be disciplined to a point in that you need to be able to get yourself to take action. But I also feel that you need to allow yourself freedom to go with the flow, trust gut instincts, check out new opportunities etc. If all you do is discipline yourself to stick to what you already know, you may never grow.
The basic lesson I learned from my MBA class is that “high-risk, high-return.” Quitting a job to pursue Internet marketing poses a potential risk of huge income loss, but if the direction is set right, the return could also be tremendously great.
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