Some further thoughts

OK, so here we are at day two of my attempts to create a blog post every day for the next 30 days.

I'll try and be careful and not just blog for the sake of it!

After a couple of fairly intensive days of creating commissioned screencasts, I have to admit to kicking back a little bit yesterday, and spending some time on non-essential activities, even though I've got a fairly full set of tasks lurking in my OmniFocus database.

Some further pondering on what I should be doing to start working smarter, resulted in deciding I need to make some further changes to my weekly working schedule. Hopefully some of these will also give me more material for my more regular blogging plans.

Firstly, I'm going to stop taking on as many commission screencasts as I have done in the past, and just focus on making ScreenCastsOnline even better. As ScreenCastsOnline built up, it was necessary to take on as much work as I could to supplement the income generated by the membership. The numbers of members have built up over the past years, so the need to supplement my income has reduced, but as anyone who works themselves will agree, it's very hard to turn down work. I'll still do the occasional commissioned screencast, but for the most part I'll try and focus on screencasts for the show.

That should give me more time to focus on some other aspects of running ScreenCastsOnline.

The next three big things I need to work on are Delegation, Automation and Education.

I need to stop being such a control freak and hand over the bulk of the membership work to my wife, so I can get on with more productive work. Running a membership based business has a significant management overhead once you reach a certain point. I think we've reached that point and actually gone past it. I'll still read all the emails that come in and respond to those I need to, but there is really no need for me to sort out missing passwords, membership queries and the like. Barb currently looks after all the merchandise related stuff at the moment, but I'm sure she'll love dealing with a ton of email too.

I just need to spend some time to sit down and walk her through it!

As far as automation and education is concerned, I'll leave those for another day as I really need to crack on with this weeks show.

By the way, as far as MacSpeech is concerned, I cheated. As I'm under bit of time pressure to start recording this weeks show, I sketched out most of this post in a text editor. But, I did use MacSpeech to enter the final text into the blog post, but resorted to manual editing for the corrections and some additions. It takes a bit of time to learn all the commands to navigate and correct text using MacSpeech but I'm determined to become more proficient using it. Did I mention education! I'll try and move across to formulating the blog posts on the fly over the next few posts.

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Belated New Years Resolutions

Yes, I know it's nearly March, but it's never too late for some New Years Resolutions.

Firstly, much as I love twitter, it has seriously impacted on my blogging activities. I think this is just because it's so easy to blast out 10 or 15 small tweets a day rather than sit down and construct a couple of paragraphs of considered text. This is a shame, so as of today, I'm going to write a blog post every single day (at least for the next 30 days).

The reason for the 30 days, well at least it gives me a target rather than blandly saying, a new post everyday forever. Hopefully, I'll become so used to it (and provide enough value to the reader), that it will be worth carrying on.

Another resolution will be for me to start using MacSpeech Dictate to write each and every blog post starting with the next one. I started using this before Macworld and was seriously impressed but I've not used it much recently. I think the reason why I've not used it, despite its impressive performance is two fold. Firstly, because of the bother of using the supplied USB headset and secondly, because to think as you speak!

Some quick testing indicates that I can use my podcasting mike which is permanently set up on a boom, to record my ramblings and have it accurately transcribed, so that's the first barrier out of the way. As far as thinking whilst you speak, by forcing myself to use MacSpeech Dictate for each blog post, that will give me plenty of practice to get into this new mindset. I just know it's going to speed things up significantly for me once I master it, heck, it may even be a good subject for a show! (Full disclosure - The copy of MacDictate I have is a review copy which unusually, I did not buy. I've not agreed on any promotion or coverage with the vendor - just so you know!)

So that will be enough for now although there are a couple of other belated New Year Resolutions I think I need to adopt. But I'll leave that for another blog post!

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