I can fall pretty quickly into a social media spiral or a website design black hole (anyone else?) Because I’m 100 percent responsible for the success of everything at DIY Writing, I obsess over details and fear letting anything go.
For example, in this moment, I’m physically uncomfortable remembering that the “Buy” buttons on my e-course sales page are not aligned properly. The HTML says they should sit a certain way on the page, but they don’t. It’s driving me crazy.
But I had to let it go. I walked away. Look at that page now. They’re friggin’ crooked. This is a new victory for me.
I spent two weeks in Seattle last month with just my iPad. Without reasonable accommodations, every superfluous thing in my business just dropped from my mind.
I can’t edit a table on E-Pub worksheets from my Google Docs app – wait, why was that a table in the first place and not just the words in text?
No SEO plugin on the WordPress app? Maybe just write the damn post and share it.
Can’t bold the title in a Google+ post? Stop wasting precious seconds! Just write it and move on.
And what did I do with all the time I didn’t spend finagling the branding and marketing of my business?
I wrote. Every day. I reached 40,000 words in the manifesto I haven’t touched since November.
I read. I finished Orange is the New Black, and started If You Want to Write and a YA novel from a favorite author.
I signed on a new coaching client, and watched an existing client release a new product.
I hosted my first E-Pub Workshop.
I posted to this blog – but skipped a day when I had nothing good to say and didn’t even feel bad about it.
I sent my monthly email newsletter, with a newly-simplified format that focuses on just the words.
I had two guest posts and a Q&A published and was named on two lists of top blogs for writers.
I finished the proof for an ebook I’ve been working on strategically avoiding since last summer (Google Docs FTW!)
I like it when people tell me my website is pretty (and I sort of gloat quietly when they think I hired a designer to do it). I like when a blog or social media post pops just right with all the boldness, italicizin’, and featured imagery to accompany the words. I enjoy an ebook that makes as much of an impact with its design as with its content. I love a conversation with friends, readers, or colleagues on Twitter.
But I am a writer first.
When writing isn’t my primary focus, I’ve failed. And I’ve been failing for a long time now. It’s time to get back to basics.
I’m loosely setting this restriction for my work: “Only if it can be done on the iPad . . .”
If you’re unfortunate enough to be among our inner circle, you may have heard Stefan and me once or twice gushing about our “new” iPads over the past month. We each allotted the biggest spot on our 2013 Christmas lists to a refurb iPad 2, and we’ve sort of fallen head over heels.
The surface-level benefits of the tablet are good enough: With Verizon MiFi, a bluetooth keyboard, and an iPad battery life that gets me through the day, I can actually get work done from the road. I can answer emails and post to social media from something much more suitable than a phone, so our long car rides or flights are not wasted. And I can write whenever (and wherever) the bug hits me.
My love for writing, unrestricted, has been renewed.
I thought the iPad would reduce my stress because it would hand me extra hours to work each day while I’m traveling, so I wouldn’t get behind on all that network-y, promotion-y, mareket-y stuff that takes so much time and energy in this business.
Instead, my stress is gone, because the simplicity of writing from this device has completely shifted my mindset away from all that peripheral stuff and back onto writing. I’d been forgetting to do that . . .
If I want to continue to travel and successfully grow this business, being able to do almost everything from a portable device is imperative. But even more important is that setting this “on the iPad” restriction forces me to focus on just creating and sharing content and letting all the little things go.
I know that if I want to call myself a solopreneur, I have to run a business; and that business involves more than just writing. But for too long I’ve been squeezing in writing in spare moments around all the “requirements” of business. I’m flipping the script. I write first. When there’s time and energy for branding, marketing, and business-building, it’ll happen.
When there’s not, at least I will have written something.
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