Hello again. Today I was looking over my computer and I noticed that I had a ton of ebooks. I did a search for .pdf files and I came up with over 400 items. Sure some are check stubs, some are user manuals for snowblowers, generators, tillers and the like but a good portion are e-books.
I have all of these because they seemed like a good idea at the time. Many are related to my minor obsession with kettlebells. Many are, lately, related to blogging and business building. I then looked at my bookmarks in Firefox. I have a ton of sites saved for later. I then checked my rss reader and I have better than 50 sites to slog through on there.
I then looked at the jumbled mess of paper on my desk, the top sheet filled with notes on places to look at, affiliate programs to refer back to, forums to visit, and pages to write.
It made me think of the title of this post. Where do you draw the line and dump all of the old stuff? Where do you decide to make a break and just go forward? I talked a bit about this in one of my previous posts: Seeking out the flash we want instead of the stuff we need. Where am I going to dump things that my brain says “yes I REALLY REALLY do want them” and just forget about it. I can’t tell you how many bookmarks I have that I haven’t touched for years. There were some on there a while ago that were so old the URL had expired and wasn’t even parked anymore.
I then get to thinking I am getting a handle on it, when I look at my bookshelf and see so many books that I would like to read. Then I get invites to read something else. Then I get free books to write reviews on. But there is TV that is so good right now. There are all of these movies that I have to watch. (I have a couple of DVD’s from Xmas 2008 that I haven’t seen yet).
I am facing some truths now. If I am going to be serious as a blogger and truly treat this as a full time job and be able to expect full time income then I have to break down and prioritze. I hav4e to actually plan out my day in order to get posts written, novels written, comments out there and other things read. I am going to have to dump 90% of my bookmarks that I don’t use anyway. I am going to dump rss feeds that haven’t had a new post for a week. I am going to visit forums on MWF and not every day. I am only going to check my alexa and affiliate ranks and balances once a week. I am going to write like a madman and comment like Ben Lumley or James Richmond. If you don’t know they comment a lot. Take that SEO.
So, today is forum day. I am off. It is also the start of the Pre-writing challenge! See my page here! I have 4 ideas starting development right now and more to come this month.
I think I will also sort through all of those ebooks that I am never going to get to. I can only hope that my ebooks won’t end up in the “never going to read that but maybe some day” file.
Thanks for reading yet again, tomorrow is fiction Saturday! Part 3 of Death With A Vengeance.
Just a side note, this post was going to be a short one but it now tops 600 words. This is cool because it is getting easier to write longer the more practice I get. My biggest story barrier has been breaking 5000 words. this is fantastic practice!
Until Tomrrow,
Justin
