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Victory!

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Planning Tagged with , , March 6th, 2010 @ 8:38 pm

I just accomplished a little hurdle today on my journey to establish my new “secret” project! It seems like a little thing, but getting those post office box keys felt like a major achievement. Especially because I don’t yet have any mail to come to that post office box – it’s like a little reminder that now I’ve shelled out a bit more precious money, so I can’t give up. I need to keep plugging forward.

You see, I’m going to (finally) start my own business. (Go me!) It may not be a huge earner, and it may not turn a big profit for a while. It may never turn a big profit. But I’m very excited about it, and I can’t wait to get my first client.

I’ve even got plans for that. I may have to beg, and I will probably have to give out quite a few freebies. For this particular endeavor, I had thought to drop off at businesses, but I have a feeling I may have more luck at libraries. And perhaps bookstores – I’ve always thought that if I had my own business I would be sticking my business cards in relevant books at bookstores. Can you get in trouble for that? Maybe not if I ask the manager. Or maybe that would flag.

Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. I read that once.

Or used bookstores.

Well, anyway! Victory for Nicki! Yay!

Just When Things Were Looking Down…

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Financial, Planning Tagged with , , February 12th, 2010 @ 6:00 am

So I’ve been hopelessly behind on work projects, and I was even in the process of writing a post about how I don’t like designing websites anymore, when I got started on one of said work projects and pretty much smoked through all but the last 1/2 hour of polishing in the last 2 hours.

I’m supposed to be in bed right now, and surely my husband is worried. (It’s 12:30 a.m. as I write this, and I have to go to work tomorrow.) But was it worth it?

When the project is completed by the other party, I will have earned enough money to pay for 3 months of Internet.

I have gained some motivation, as the project wasn’t as difficult as I had been fearing – which is what kept me from working on it these past two months.

My butt is sore from sitting for so long in the same position.

I’m not completely finished, and I may not be able to get back to the project for the next 24-72 hours.

I think it was worth it.

Brain Rot and the $100 Jello Challenge

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Planning Tagged with , February 2nd, 2010 @ 6:00 am

I’ve been more interested lately in my Wii (Wii Fit Plus and Animal Crossing: City Folk) and my book (Girls of Riyadh) than I have been in making connections between life and interesting reading material to make a post here. I sort of feel like my frantic busyness at work is washing over to home. I feel unstructured. Like Jell-O without a mold.

I just decided to make a list of things I feel I must get done now. And you know, I could only thing of one thing.

I need to make more money.

That’s it, that’s all I could think of. I don’t need to clean the house – I can push that on the weekend for the worst areas. I don’t need to spend more time with the kids – I already spend as much time as I can, and I won’t take away from it. I don’t have to read more, tidy up, organize, or anything else. Right now, money is my priority.

“But money doesn’t buy happiness!” My mind threw that one out as I thought about what other people may be thinking right now, which is really what I’m probably thinking without wanting to admit it. Sure, money doesn’t buy happiness, but money does fix the leaky bathtub. Money does pay for the Internet, daycare, and saving up for an emergency. More incoming funds do those things, and allow me to stress less about where the money will come from.

I will earn $100 in February.

Right now I honestly don’t know how that’s going to happen. $100 is a lot. I’m not going to put any extra funds into this little adventure – I’m going to do online things that don’t cost anything. If I earn money and decide to spend that cash trying to earn more, I think that’s okay.

There’s a goal. It feels like a big goal. If I meet it early, I’ll raise the stakes.

The plan for tomorrow:

  • Squidoo – I wrote a list of ideas for lenses. I’m going to pull pictures and sketch modules for one tomorrow.
  • mTurk – I earned a whopping $11 over 3 months, then gave up. Maybe if I give it a half-hour a night, I could rack up $20.
  • I’m going to see if there’s anything that will fetch a price on eBay. I can get the buyer to pay for shipping, so it doesn’t really count as outgoing money.

Here we go.

Thinking…thinking…thinking…

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Personal Enrichment, Planning Tagged with , , , January 12th, 2010 @ 6:00 am

The kids and I just watched the second Night in the Museum movie – I liked The Thinker.

Recently (two nights ago – very recently) my husband, who regularly goes to bed before I do because it takes him 4x as long as long to fall asleep, asked if I would be staying up late on his way to bed. I replied that I hadn’t really thought about it, and proceeded to work and plan (I’ll be honest – mostly play) for the next four hours, not getting to bed until 12:30 a.m. the next morning.

What was my problem, you may ask?

I didn’t think about it.

I know from experience that when I spend 15 minutes or so – sometimes even less – thinking about what I want to get done at work or with the kids, my success rate and how I feel about my day is a lot higher than when I just “let things go”.

Maybe it’s all in my head. Seeing things checked off on a list does give a person a certain sense of accomplishment. Maybe I’m accomplishing the exact same amount of stuff in a night when I just goof off for hours as opposed to nights like last night, when I made a list of six items and accomplished five, all before midnight (mostly).

But even if it is just an illusion, I think I like it. As I write this, it’s about 14 minutes to midnight. I think I’ll polish this up, then spend five minutes thinking about tomorrow.

The Easter Bunny Order of Business

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Editorial, Personal Enrichment, Planning Tagged with , , , , January 7th, 2010 @ 6:00 am

Someone told me today that I’m like the Easter Bunny.

That wasn’t really a compliment.

I have been delegating assignments, and when one comes across my desk that belongs to someone else, I give it to that person. I get a form, and if the form has this one job checked, I need to pass it along. But I can’t always just hand the paper over – several different people need it.

So yesterday I had a bunch of these jobs, and I emailed them over to the person whose responsibility it was. Today I got some more before that person came to work, so I wrote them down on a sticky note and put it in their bin where they would see it when they came to work. And then after they arrived, I got another one (part of the reason I gave this job away – it just doesn’t quit!), and called it in.

Just like the Easter Bunny, I spread the assignments all over the place. I wasn’t purposely hiding them, of course, but it certainly wasn’t the most effective way to get the message across. Because do you know what happens with Easter eggs that you hide really well so that they’re never found?

You find them next year.

We actually did that once. In early March, I found a hard-boiled egg from the previous Easter. Didn’t even smell.

But things don’t work out that well in business. When you misplace a note in the office, business doesn’t get done, and people get upset. Maybe it’s not critical, but maybe it is. And really, handing notes, phone calls, emails – doing all three isn’t very organized.

What is the best way to organize the passing of assignments? Paper? Then I have to make a trip from my office to theirs, and who knows how many times a day I’ll have to do it. Email? I’m trying to get away from checking my email – and sending them – a zillion times a day. Phone? The person who gets the assignment isn’t always in when I need to pass them along.

I read about Batching in 4HWW. How could I batch this process without A) forgetting, B) losing the assignments, or C) making a colossal mess of it all. (That last one? I wouldn’t really do that. I couldn’t think of a third thing.)

The obvious is making it a routine. Obviously. How in the heck does one do that?

Start with reminders. Maybe an Outlook reminder that will pop up and drive me nuts. Or an alarm – maybe I could set my iPhone to go off at some time at the end of the day. Except if I’m not in the office, I wouldn’t hear it. Perhaps I could set my cell phone to go off, and then carry it with me – that would be loud enough, and I think I can set it up to go every day.

Well there we go. One less Easter Bunny sighting before Easter.

Oh yes! Before I forget – yesterday morning when I got to work, instead of playing games all morning I pulled out my notebook and made some blog design notes that really helped me with an agent website template, read a chapter in a really boring book that I think I’m going to refuse to read again because why would I waste my time on something boring, and then the day went by really slowly, and I got a lot of stuff done. It was a good day.

Original graphic minus bunny by Hilde Vanstraelen.

2010, Bring It On

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Financial, Home, Personal Enrichment, Planning Tagged with , , December 21st, 2009 @ 6:00 am

With a little help from the planner and article that Chris Guillebeau over at The Art of Non-Conformity published, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do next year. it involves an awful lot of reading, writing, and financial planning, really, with a healthy dash of extra income and healthy lifestyle adjustment. And of it all goes according to plan, it will be one heck of a year.

With this planning, I’m looking at the next year in a way I never have before. I always enjoy making a list of resolutions to get me through the New Year, those that are to begin promptly at midnight on January 1st, and are to be discarded as somehow soiled beyond repair if I don’t strictly adhere to them and execute them perfectly every day. (Can you tell I’ve been watching The Last Samurai? I can!) To put it more direct, if I can’t keep it up, then I give it up.

This time I’m trying to think of things as stepping stones. Yes, I want to do all these things, but they can’t happen all at once. For example, I want to drop a pant size (by when, I haven’t yet decided). To do that, I’ll need to drink less soda and more water, get more exercise and more rest, and stop pigging out so often (calorie control). And I also want to write a 50,000 word novel outside of NaNoWriMo. Well, I hate to admit it, but those two activities, currently and in my world, are mutually exclusive. They do not coexist. Writing is staying up late and not getting enough sleep and drinking to much caffeine to assist in it all. Healthy is sleeping in all my spare time and overdosing on water and making fifteen trips to the bathroom in a day at work.

But if I made drinking more water a habit, say for two months, and that’s all I focused on. Forget the sleep, soda, food, and exercise (or if not forget, at least not focus on exclusively). Concentrate on getting all my water in every day until it is a habit I stop thinking about and simply continue. Then suddenly adding in exercise to the mix isn’t so difficult. And once that’s a habit, I can try working writing into my schedule.

Just an example, but you get the idea.

New Year’s Resolutions in the past have consisted of:

  1. Give up soda
  2. Sleep more
  3. Stop biting nails (got that one several years ago, FWIW)
  4. Write more
  5. Journal every day
  6. Write two novels this year (had that one last year)
  7. Et cetera

That’s a small sample, but perhaps you can see how even trying to remember to do those things all at the same time would be difficult.

I haven’t got it all ironed out yet, and you’ll probably see more of these posts in the next week from me. I’m recreating Chris’ spreadsheet because his wasn’t working for me, and this is an ordeal in itself. Trying to find enough time (and attention) to complete it is still a challenge, but I know I can make it work. All the while I’m competing with website ideas, a secondary business idea, and oh yeah! My family needs my attention too in all of this.

Plus, you know, Christmas.

So we’ll see how it goes. Perhaps it will proceed better than planned.

Planning Your Year

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Editorial, Financial, Personal Enrichment, Planning Tagged with , , December 10th, 2009 @ 6:00 am

planningOkay, for a blog that at one point (not too long ago) was supposed to be purely about planning, I’m not a very good planner. Since then (very recently), this has sort of morphed into a personal essay blog. I feel like I’m driving a college student around that wants to try everything out on their way to figuring out what they really want to do with their life. I’m going to let that be okay for now. Eventually it will become something, and right now I’m content to write whatever pleases me and see how things develop.

But that doesn’t feel like a good planning strategy. Chris Guillebeau has a good planning strategy, and I’m plodding my way through it right now. Here’s what I’ve gotten through my head so far.

Number one – making rigid plans you hate is bad. I have a habit of making rigid plans, and then feeling absolutely miserable when I can’t maintain them. That is a class act way of making oneself more depressed. Not a great way to actually meet your goals.

Number two – New Year’s Resolutions that are not resolute suck. Why make a huge list (as I tend to do) of things that can’t be accomplished? For me, New Year’s Resolutions are no good if you don’t start from January 1st and maintain them continuously for the entire year. “Exercise every day,” is a very easy resolution to break the first time you get sick, or get bored, or get stressed, or simply get too busy. Back to depression, irritation, and more stress. Nice.

Number three – how do you know when you’ve “written more”, “exercised more”, or “given more to charity”? If you can’t measure it, how do you know you’ve met it? Oh yeah, you can’t!

I’m all about this Annual Review, now that I’ve read through both articles by Chris. It’s all I want to do, even though there are many more things that I know I need to get done in these evenings before the end of the year. My hope is that this ritual, done in fits and bursts before January 1st will help me get my other tasks done in the new year.

Know what my first goal is going to be? Setting up a weekly schedule for my evenings so I can get some good habits started.

And then I’m going to try this.

Business Cards, How I Love Thee

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Planning Tagged with , , , , , , October 30th, 2009 @ 8:00 am

business cardsI’m a paper freak. I love paper, the different textures, how it feels and sounds when you’ve written on a whole notebook of it. I like stationery, I love notebooks, and journals have a special place in my heart. I really don’t know whether I write because I love the feel of my novels printed out and bound in a book, or whether I love paper because I write. Either way, paper is a very good thing.

As an extension of that obsession (anyone remember the Paper.Obsession clique way back in the day? That was me), I have a thing for business cards. I love looking at the posts of the most creative business cards, but my real passion is just your regular 2″ x 3″ card stock.

Card Stock

A heavy weight card is imperative, in my opinion. So many people have cheap, flexible, crap business cards – some who haven’t even bothered to trim off the perforated edges of the make-them-yourself sort. Nothing screams amateur more than when you present yourself with an off-centered, raggedy edged, less than 67 lb card. It’s just nasty.

If you wonder if it really matters? It does. It completely does. There are a ton of affordable options that there really is no excuse.

Frills

Gloss is optional. Well-placed spot gloss can be amazingly effective (spot gloss is where the card is only glossy in certain areas, usually used to enhance the design). Sometimes the gloss is free, sometimes it costs you. Sometimes it just makes your card prone to finger prints. It always makes it virtually impossible to write on your cards, so think about that.

DIY

If you’re going to do it yourself because of monetary constraints, the need to be in control, or quantity limits, make sure you get the cards that will have clean edges. Avery makes a great double-sided clean-edge business card. I also am not opposed to getting a very heavy weight card stock and cutting them yourself, or taking them to someplace like Staples with a precision cutting tool that can cut a quantity at a time. But be precise. Off center = amateur.

Costs

My favorite business card ever in terms of the paper it was printed on was going to cost $200+ for 1000 cards. That’s amazingly expensive in my world, but then I’m not a customer of über high end cards, either. And they were really, really nice cards.

When ordering business cards online either from a company that will design for you or from someone who will expect you to upload your own design, make sure you get samples first. I am positively amazed at the difference in quality when looking at supposedly the same product from different companies. Since so many online business card companies offer free sample packs, go crazy. I have a tote bag filled with sample packs, and I look through them regularly to find the best quality when my agents ask questions about those particular products. It’s a very valuable resource.

Reputation

In the end, though, remember that in many occupations, you are your business card for a lot of people. You of course are best represented by your reputation, but even the best referral can be turned off by your card before meeting you.

Need help with your business card? Leave a comment and I’ll shoot you an email to see if I can help!

What Is Your Dream?

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Planning Tagged with , , October 23rd, 2009 @ 8:39 am

Dare to DreamAnd what are you doing to make it happen?

My dream is to become a published author of a novel, and if possible to become a well known author as well. I want to be able to quit my day job because my writing earns us enough money that I don’t have to do anything else.

I want to wake up at 5:30 in the morning, go for a run, and then walk my kids to school. I want to spend my mornings writing and my afternoons on chores and playing with my kids.

I want to be able to afford a babysitter for an occasional Saturday night date.

I would love to sell enough books to make any sort of best-seller list.

Making this dream happen has always seemed like luck, and something that would happen “someday”. I’ve never really thought about how to accomplish it aside from expecting I’d have to find an agent at some point.

But things – rules – are changing. Self-publishing no longer seems like a death knell, but now a viable option. A necessary option.

So what am I doing to make my dream happen? I only write once a year, for NaNoWriMo. I don’t edit my completed works. In fact, I’d be lucky to be able to find all the NaNo novels I’ve written (one a year since 2003) on my computer.

I need to write more. Writing here is a good start, I think. Writing daily (yes, I’m still trying to make it happen daily) is a necessary exercise for me. Once a daily 500+ word article/editorial is regular habit, adding a 2000+ word goal to my daily writing regime will be the next step.

I need to edit more. I have this nasty habit of thought – once I am done writing, I’m done. It’s good enough the way it is, and I shouldn’t have to do anything more to it. That’s wrong, I know it is. Not everything can be fixed, but everything should be reviewed for spelling, and I should get some help with my grammar.

I need to pick a work, anything from a NaNo novel to a collection of short stories, and publish it. I need to go to one of those self-publishing houses (I know of several), buy an ISBN, and get that sucker out on B&N and Amazon. Then I need to use my amazing marketing skills that I’ve picked up in my current career, and use them to promote myself and my writing.

I can do this, I know I can. If I never try, I’ll always wonder whether I could have done it. I’ll be old and gray and hate myself that I didn’t do it when I was in my prime (although I think perhaps my prime was ten years ago, not today).

What is your dream? And what are you doing to make it happen?

I Am My Worst Client

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Business, Completely Off Topic, Financial, Planning Tagged with , , , October 19th, 2009 @ 8:00 am

I am apparently impossible to please. I don’t know if it’s because I’m working for myself and not someone else, but geez! I’m just not happy with anything!

When I take a moment to sit back and try to treat me like someone else (are you following me, here?), I do much better. What would I think about if I was working for someone else? What would I want to know that would give me a hint about where to start? Those things help. Not completely, but a bit.

When I sit down and just draw, or doodle, as long as I don’t have a project in mind, it’s helpful. But when I start drawing with the intent on working on a current job? It’s hard.

(Oh, a fire alarm needs a battery. Note to self: buy 9 volts.)

Last night as I did my finances it became clear that I need to start getting the Internet to generate funds. I have a plan, but first I need to complete my own project first. Once that’s done, I think I can take it to the for-profit arena.

And now that October is almost over, it will become easier. This month was a flurry of activity. November is busy too, with National Novel Writing Month going on and me being a co-ML again this year, but it will be activities I’m now familiar with, and shouldn’t be too taxing. I think I’m also giving myself permission to not win at all costs this time around. November is a big month for me to gain weight, usually. Hmm, I wonder why? ;)

(I think I need a category for Gradually Off Topic…)

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