Today was one of these days (I get the feeling there are many) where I didn’t do anything directly for your book: I didn’t write, I didn’t even research. But I made sure all that will be easier in the future.
First, I made a plan. Parkinson’s law is a thing, especially with long-term projects (“oh gosh, is it May already?”), so I wrote a plan for my boss. He wanted to see one – makes sense; he pays for me writing this book. It’s a conversative schedule that has some buffers for unexpected delays & todos I don’t or can’t think of yet (“This person gave me a really good idea for a whole new chapter in the book; how could I not think of that before!”).
In my private docs, I made another schedule. A tighter, and more detailed (day-to-day) one for the next few months – a schedule with deadlines I might miss ever so often, but that will keep me on track to be efficient. To do that, I wrote in Google Calendar when I’ll work on what. It’s a trick I learned from days when I feel stressed, or days when I feel like I won’t get stuff done on time: Blocking time directly in Google Calendar makes me feel like “ok, right, I work for eight hours a days, that’s a lot of time, I can do that.”
I like to be a conservative planner because I like to actually deliver on time. It makes me feel good. Let’s see how that all goes.
The second thing I did is emailing the first few people and asking them if I can interview them in January. I’m very excited about speaking to people and doing these kind of “user interviews”.
Oh, and another exciting thing happened: Goof from Graphic Hunters officially opened the ticket sale for the color workshop (and to other great-looking workshops) I’ll give on February 3rd. I tweeted about it here.
Open question: How to best interview these people?