RoW80 Sunday Check In

Well after missing a check in last week (thanks in no small part to a wedding reception where the best man dumped his girlfriend) I’m back on the wagon of taking part in the RoW80 Check Ins. Sadly the same cannot be said for my goals. After a disappointing few weeks I can honestly say that things have not gotten much better. I’m not sure why but it feels almost as though I fell out of love with writing for a while. I can feel that enjoyment coming back though, due in no small part to having spent the last three hours working and writing blog posts. Hopefully I can keep hold of that enjoyment, remember it and get back to hitting my goals like I was doing before.

Now, enough of me being miserable, let’s have a look at how I’ve done this week:

Post 1 blog post other than a RoW80 check in a week –   This actually seems to be one of the goals that I’m consistently hitting. Even when I was at my worst, not really doing much of anything I was still preparing blog posts and putting them up on time. It’s something that I really enjoy doing. I mentioned at the beginning of August that I was planning on sorting out my own website or moving to Wordpress but I think that for now I’m going to stay where I am. I would like to move eventually but until my monetary circumstances work themselves out I cannot really afford web hosting and all that other shiny stuff.

Progress – Excellent

30 Minutes on social media a day – I’ve been on twitter a little more but every time that I think to myself ‘Oh I’ll go on LinkedIn in a little while and check out something I saw in the discussions’ I quickly forget until the next time that I get an email. I’m still not spending 30 minutes a day on social media. Next week I plan on focusing on this goal, getting it down until it becomes second nature to do it, just like I did with the blogging goal.

Progress – Very poor

Spend 1 hour doing a creative activity each day – Yeah... not so great with this one. I’ve barely written 1,000 words a day on the Autharium project this week, something that only takes me half an hour at best. It felt briefly as though I was falling out of love with the project, I had forgotten why I was writing it in the first place and was completely focused on the end piece. That is not how you write good stories. I’m going to try to work my way back up next week but take it slow and steady so that I can get the momentum going again the week after.

Progress – Poor

Spend 1 hour doing a different creative activity each day – Again, this has been a terrible thing. I’ve spent more time watching tv than I have doing anything creative outside of working or blogging. It’s not even as though I’m pushed for time and super busy. I’m not. I have too much time on my hands I think and it shows. Once I’ve gotten the other two goals down into a habit I think I will properly focus on this one. In the meantime I’ll give it my best try but it comes second place to other things.

Progress – Abysmal

Start and try for completion of projects on the order day – This one has been fantastic. I’ve been receiving more work, and it’s been a wider variety of work as well. I’m not just ghost writing now, I’m proofreading and editing. I’m also writing book descriptions on Fiverr, something to get me into practice for when it’s my turn and getting me that little bit of extra income that I know is there in an emergency.

Progress – Great

Over all it’s been a mixed bag. Actually scratch that. I’ve been letting myself down quite a lot. I forgot that these goals are there to help me build a work ethic, to help me get into the swing of things and create some habits that will only help me improve as a writer. I got carried away and arrogant, thinking that I could do absolutely everything at once and thought of them as just goals, not a means to an end. Now I’ve realised that though I can focus once more on treating them as habit building activities, working on one thing each week more than the others until I do them all almost without thinking. It’s definitely the social media one that I struggle with the most however. I just don’t see how I can do it.

What do you think? Do you have any tips to using social media as a marketing/networking tool? Are there any social media formats that you might suggest I use? Am I being too hard on myself? Am I being too soft on myself?! Do I just need a kick up the backside and a good week of hitting my goals to get back on track? Let me know below in the comments and maybe it might help other people too.

 Created by Kait Nolan in 2010 after she began to struggle with the madness that is NaNoWriMo A Round of Words in 80 Days (or RoW80 as it is commonly known by participants) is the writing challenge that knows you have a life. In four sentences she sums up the idea of RoW80 perfectly: "We are all different and we all have different demands on our time.  Why should we all have the same goal?  The simple answer is that we shouldn’t.  If you want to be a writer, then you have to be able to roll with the punches and adapt to your changing circumstances.  If that means changing your goals when your life blows up, so be it.  ROW80 is the challenge that champions the marriage of writing and real life."
Be sure to check out other participants and how their goals are going here at the clicky list and be sure to leave a comment on their blogs to encourage them on.