Time, please! (And a VERY SPECIAL OFFER!) by Cathy Ace

BUSINESS: How best do you manage your time and resources? What tools are helping you manage life while you complete your next work? Websites? Apps? Tricks of the trade?

My only real resources are my time, and my money. I probably give more thought to how I spend my money than my time, because my money is a limited resource, whereas I think of my time as something I can keep giving...

Let's start with promotional costs. I have to put time into promoting myself, rather than money, whenever possible; blog posts, guest blogs, interviews, podcasts...all are ways I can try to bring news about my work to potential readers at no cost - except time - to me. My use of social media is limited to Twitter and Facebook; I work on both every day, reading, Retweeting or Sharing, commenting and so forth, as well as creating my own posts. I post to my Cathy Ace – Author FB page probably four or five times a week, but interact on my Cathy Ace Facebook page several times each day, including weekends. If anything, this tends to INCREASE when I am writing or editing because – let’s be honest – that’s when I'm looking for displacement activities, and can only wash the kitchen floor so often!

However, sometimes I just have to put my hand in my pocket and try something new. For example, RIGHT NOW (starting today, February 6th, but only for a few days) I am offering my latest book, the psychological suspense novel The Wrong Boy, for just $2.99 (local currency) in the USA, Canada & Australia, £2.99 in the UK and ₹195.00 in India. (Buy links are below, of course!)

Click here for KINDLE link

Click here for NOOK link  

Click here for KOBO link  

Why? I decided to buy into a BookBub deal (BookBub is a daily email I get as a reader which tells me about cut-price offers on e-books. I don't feel "guilty" about taking advantage of the low prices because I know the author/publisher has made the decision to offer them at a low price for a short time, with the explicit aim of getting the books to be read by as wide an audience as possible.) Today an email will go to about 750,000 people around the world telling them my book is available at just $2.99 etc. Since I've had to drop the price for the Kindle, Kobo and Nook books in any case, it makes sense to me to now tell as many people as possible about the offer...you included! It will never be available at a lower price. Honestly. Try it?

Sales pitch over!

 

The next "Biggie”? My website. When I began this writing journey I had a rudimentary website that I’d set up using a free template on (I think!) Wordpress. It did its job for a while, but as soon as I gave up work to write full time I knew I needed something that would actually work on my behalf. I found a local website designer who set up something just for me at a low-ish cost, and he updated it for me on an ongoing basis as I added books, a new series of books, questions for book clubs etc. I was able to update my own events, but that was about it. He decided to not do this sort of work any longer at about the time I knew I needed a different solution – a website I could be more hands-on with managing myself, without having to pay someone to update it for me each time I needed that done...balancing time and money.

So, what to do? Well, I did what being in this business has taught me to do – I asked people whose websites I admired how they handled theirs, and was delighted when Terry Shames (yes, our own Terry) came back to me and told me her son had put together her new website, which I liked very much. I was delighted with what said son-of-fellow-blogger did for me, and now I have a website I can update and change for myself…which looks exactly as I wanted it to – which I love! Thanks Geoff Shames. It required an investment which (to me) was a lot of money but it’s worth it, because now I am in control...more time, but less outgoings over time. 

Click through here to reach my website

Now that I can update it myself I do so often – because I think a website needs to be up to date to be effective. A good deal of what I do online (Twitter, Facebook) is with the aim of driving traffic to my website to “find out more about…” whatever it might be, so it’s important that the website is able to cope, becoming the go-to place for much of what I do online. 

When it comes to time management, I am hopeless. There, I have admitted it. I ABSOLUTELY HATE ROUTINE (loud enough?) which means I cannot work to a schedule because I feel stifled after a few days and begin to lose the will to live. So I do what I do when I feel I need to do it. I tend to give priority in the day to “business” and leave writing/editing until later…right through to 2am (my most productive writing hours are usually 9pm-2am) which works for me. 

 

So, I suppose you could say I do have a routine, but I don’t dare acknowledge it as such, or I would fight against it. Yes, my rebellious streak shows itself even now.

Please consider reading my new book?

Click through here for the synopsis and blurbs 

 

Time: The Most Important Resource

Terry here, answering our question of the week: How best do you manage your time and resources? What tools are helping you manage life while you complete your next work? Websites? Apps? Tricks of the trade?

The operative concept here is “manage your time and resources.” Which makes me think of what my most valuable resources are. Turns out that I think of time as my most precious resource.  I have a note to myself that I wrote on the first day of this year. It reads:

                             2019 has 365 days—8,760 hours
                                          Use them wisely

I needed the note because I don’t use my time wisely. I fool around—on Facebook, doing crossword puzzles, texting my son, raving about politics with my husband. I often think of it as time wasted. But if am more generous with myself, I realize that I can’t really write—and by write, I mean put words onto a page—more than four hours a day. I’ve always been that way. And a lot of what I think of as “wasting time” is actually time when brain is doodling around on some problem with writing. That I can feel okay about. It’s when I am just wasting time to avoid work that I wish I had a magic way of reminding myself that I need to use the time wisely, because again, it’s my most precious resource. Thus, the note.

There’s so much more to writing than “just” writing. There’s marketing, promotion, setting up events, and, if you have events with others, coordinating their time with yours. Marketing and promotion can be a world-class time suck. It’s for a real purpose, but it sometimes feels like the black hole, where time disappears. So, to get a grip on the time I spend, I have decided to hire a virtual assistant. I just gave her her first task last week, and it felt wonderful to turn over to her something that I didn’t mind doing, but that I simply didn’t have the time for.  

I don’t know how I would use websites or apps to help me manage my life. I have always been reasonably organized, and when I feel overwhelmed I sit down with the primitive tools of pen and paper and make a list. On the list I don’t differentiate between writing chores and life chores. “Write Blog” will be right next to “Water Plants.” “Call plumber” will be next to “Ask agent about….” When I’m spinning out of control, this steadies me. After the first few things are crossed off the list, I often don’t even go back to it. At that point, the bullet points are in my head because I’ve written them down.

One thing I know about myself is that once I plunge deeply into working on a novel, the rest of the world falls away. My house gets messy, friendships dangle (thank God, I’ve got a circle of long-time friends who understand), sometimes the mail doesn’t get opened, and books I intended to read languish. So before I start, I make a big push to make sure everything is reasonably in order. The plumbing leak is fixed, the stash of batteries is replenished, etc.

But I do have a couple of tips for managing  time that serves me well:

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1) Long ago, I took a time management class. The best advice I got was,  “only handle a piece of paper once.” Nowadays, it’s “only handle an email once.” If I can answer an email the minute I get it, I do so. It saves me from having to read it again “later.” It keeps me from forgetting to get back to someone. People are often surprised when I get back to them so quickly. But it’s because of that rule. Sometimes I can’t answer something immediately, so I flag it, and go over the flags the next day to find out what I need to take care of.

3) Set goals. I have read these really intricate goal-setting ideas, and I admire anyone who can do them. But I set loose goals—finish the first draft by “x” date, do a rough outline, update website. I sometimes write them down, but even when I don’t, they are in the back of my mind.

Besides time, there’s one other resource that I’m careful about: my health. I am religious about getting exercise. I go to the gym three days a week and the other days I either go for a walk or do the stationary bike. It’s mandatory. I find it’s good not just for physical, but mental health. I wish there was an app or a website to do exercise for me, but alas, the sweat equity has to come from me alone.

I’m looking forward to hearing what my blog partners say about this this week. And I’d like to hear from readers? How do manage your resources?

I can manage time better than I can manage cats

Q: How best do you manage your time and resources? What tools are helping you manage life while you complete your next work? Websites? Apps? Tricks of the trade?

- from Susan

Managing time? Well, I try to bargain with myself for a few uninterrupted hours a day to write. Then I have to negotiate with myself not to spend those hours on Facebook, and the latest screaming headlines in the online newspapers. There’s no negotiating with the younger cat who believes my lap belongs to her whenever she wants it, or with the supposedly mature one who does her 10,000 daily steps across the keyboard and the desk, dislodging papers and pencils and eyeglasses as she goes.

Managing resources? I’m lucky that I have no one to support but the cats and myself. I eat lightly. They don’t. My resources include space – I have a dedicated office space, many hundreds of crime fiction books that should inspire but mostly intimidate me – and a laptop. What more do I need? I don’t need apps. I sure don’t need more websites or social media. I don’t need pep talks and Netflix and the chocolate chip cookies my alter ego forces me to buy.

What I need is to get back into the zone, to sit down at the keyboard, sans animals, and feel myself diving into a world of my creation, thinking and feeling like my characters, accompanying them on their journeys. I love that but it doesn’t come when I let too many other admittedly enjoyable things get in the way of a regular “butt in chair” as Annie Lamott says.

There are no tricks, but I’m getting off to a good start in 2019. No phone calls, no internet, no food or laundry for a block of time every weekday, or five days a week if something takes over a weekday. The only trick I know is to wrestle the alligator, climb out of the pit and go back in the next day and wrestle it again. One day, I’ll forget that it’s work, however briefly, find myself in that happy zone again, and then I can stop managing and just be.

I’m thinking of banishing the cats from the office, but that is a much bigger alligator.

Picture of cat hugging shoes. Shoes are on feet.