Wednesday morning started well. The birds had their first feed of the day (they really are eating a lot in this snow) and I’d shared yesterday’s blog post within about 5 minutes. There was an email waiting for me with the first of this year’s prompts for 12 Stories in 12 Months. The word-count is 1,200 and the deadline is 29 January.
The poet treated us both to new portable hard drives, this time without disks inside them. They’re supposed to be more durable and more reliable, but time will tell. My old Seagate is still working well. I just can’t format it for Mac because that will erase everything that’s already on there. The new one is a Crucial SSD, and I’ll keep it just for the Mac.
I can’t believe how happy it makes me to have this backup hard drive. I know I have Time Machine somewhere, but I haven’t used it yet. I’m happy to just copy my entire critical data over en bloc and just re-date it every time. At least then I can delete older versions if the drive starts to get too full or too slow.
I wanted to track my time better, so I know how much of my own work is, say, designing book covers, or doing admin like, say, registering my books with ALCS, PLR and Legal Deposit, or even editing my own work. I’m a wearing-every-hat writer and I wondered if I could just ‘invoice’ myself for the work I do, so I know how much the business costs.
The problem with that is I’m not a limited company and as a sole trader I can’t invoice myself. However, I can and do ‘draw down’ money from the business. If I switched to limited company, then I could still be a sole trader in my own right, but I’d invoice the limited company for the work I do for it.
I think a certain prolific former pulp writer does something similar in that he invoices his publishing company for, say, the words he publishes in his monthly magazine. I think he also invoices for the books he publishes. He invoices a professional rate, but he doesn’t actually ‘pay’ himself, if you get my drift, other than what he already draws from the business. He does pay for artwork and printing costs, and he pays staff.
I’d pay myself then not draw any cash from the business, so leaving some in there to cover other things, like professional licenses or liability insurance or something.
I don’t know. It’s buzzing around my brain and I’m trying to work out the pros and cons and, of course, any legal repercussions. Joanna Penn runs a business. She and her hubby are directors and the business pays them both. The business also pays for services, memberships, sub-contractors, etc, etc.
I’d found some timesheets to download, but they were very PAYE (Pay [tax and NI] As You Earn) and true employee based. I could still pay myself on PAYE, but then I’d be a staff member, and I’m not sure I want to make it that formal. So I deleted them again.
My TickTick is ace, for planning and project management on a certain level. But I don’t know if there’s a timesheet function. However, in an internet search to see if Brain Focus Productivity Timer works on Mac (it doesn’t), I saw that Toggl Time Tracker is compatible.
I had Toggl before I had Asana and ClickUp, but it doesn’t have an actual tomato-type timer, the visuals of which please me a great deal. So I found Brain Focus, which does have a tomato-type timer but not the timesheet or project management facility. Brain Focus was great on any of my portable devices, but less great on the desktop. Brain Focus also had alarms I could use that told me when to stop or break or start again.
Toggl could be used on hand-held devices and desktop, albeit without the tomato timer and without any sounds. But they’re pushing you to pay a monthly membership, and it’s one of the dearer ones out there. I pay for TickTick, which does have a choice of sounds while the Pomodoro is running, but not the alarms. It also works and synchs really well across all devices and all platforms.
I’m now testing Toggl alongside TickTick, using the Toggl to analyse how much work I’m actually doing on which jobs. TickTick does have statistics, but they’re online only. And I want something that works offline too.
By midday, I’d started the Toggl timer three times alongside TickTick yesterday. I worked on The Great Novella Challenge (project), Fallen Angel (specific task). and I worked on Admin (project), Backup (specific task) and Admin (project), Thursday’s blog post (specific task).
The backup took a long time and I used that time to make a cup of tea and catch up on blogs and social media. At some point I’ll add a project called Faffing and decide on the specific tasks as and when.
So, by midday, of 2 tasks that were scheduled (share Wednesday’s blog post x 1 Pomodoro* and Fallen Angel x 2 Pomodoros), I’d done both of them. Plus some faffing. I may yet just add a generic daily task to TickTick called Faffing and just run the timer every time I, well, faff.
* It didn’t actually take a full Pomodoro, which meant I had more time to spend on Fallen Angel and Faffing.
I had my dinner break and the birds got their second feed. We’re going to have to go out today and get them some more. They’re picking everything clean.
I’m still on pre-writing this week for Fallen Angel, and it hasn’t fizzled off yet. That means I’m currently still on track for Book 3 of the Great Novella Challenge.
I pulled out my new planning folder and stared at it for a bit. Then I went onto Google Drive and grabbed a writing planner for the year, downloading it to the computer. I printed it off and added it to the planning folder and stared at that for a bit too. Then I stared at the social media content planner for a bit longer. I don’t know yet how I’m going to get all of this working for me, but I am going to get it working.
With TickTick and Toggl working side by side, I then moved on to Words Worth Reading Issue 2. I opened up The Mucky Duck for revision and when I was happy with it, I added it to the bookazine file. I proof-read it, reformatted it, and inserted the cover image. Then I moved the bookazine folder for The Mucky Duck to ‘Done’ in the issue folder, and copied the working files to the folder for the book.
About a month after the bookazine has been published, I’ll publish The Weather Can Be Murder as a standalone Wordsworth Short, then after that I’ll publish The Mucky Duck as a Wordsworth Flash Fiction. The Mucky Duck was a story I wrote for 12 Stories in 12 Months. When all of those stories have been published in the bookazine and then as standalones, I think I’m going to publish all the 12 Stories stories in a collection.
When I was happy with the bookazine, I came and finished today’s blog post, chose the image, and scheduled it to publish.
Phew! That’s a lot of different directions in a single day.
In one of our Capacity Building Workshops last year, we talked about becoming our own companies (it’s a little different here than in the UK), the legalities, the tax purposes, etc. Right now, it doesn’t make sense for me to set up as an LLC, although I think I will split the bank accounts up differently. I can be a sole proprietor without LLC status, and use a d/b/a (doing business as) for the account. That’s on my list for spring, poking deeper into that. It was good to take a few seminars that made the process less confusing.
Also, it would mean I could pitch for government contracts on the state level, for writing, although those proposals are long, longterm, and complicated.
Gosh, tell me about it. That’s what goes on inside my head for a lot of the time. At least jotting it down got it out of my head so I could think about something else.
Setting up a business, small or otherwise, looks like a right minefield.