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Hello, and welcome to this week’s WEN-zine nuggets.

Last week’s 1-3-5 Rule for Prioritization item (see Archived copy) garnered a good bit of interest, so when Monday’s Tech Productivity newsletter suggested an article on managing the tons of recurring tasks we face, it seemed like another good one to share ...

1. How to handle all your tasks effectively as a one-person business

If you're a solo business or freelancer who works mostly alone, these tips might prove useful in how you help get stuff done without becoming overwhelmed.

Don’t try to do everything every day – You can’t do every task required for your business on a daily basis. It just doesn’t work, but most people fall into traps such as jumping around between every “department” every day. (Yeah, I’ve tried that ... doesn’t work for long.)

Step 1: Move your recurring tasks to the highest possible cadence – You want to think about the types of tasks that you need to do on a recurring basis. These could be things like emails, social media posts, administrative tasks, tracking stats, sales outreach, etc. Write them all down on a piece of paper.

Once you’ve done that, think about how often you NEED to do these tasks. Emphasis on the word “need” here. You may find that some tasks you currently do every day, could actually be done once a week, or perhaps even once a month.

For example, emails probably need to be responded to every day, so there’s not much movement there.

Tracking stats on the other hand probably only needs to be done once a week, or maybe even once a month. Do you need to have enterprise-level daily tracking, or would a once-a-month overview be sufficient?

Another example is social media posts. Many people write social media posts every day, whereas they could easily be written once a week and scheduled for the entire week.

Step 2: Organize your tasks into batches – Batching is the process of taking all tasks of a similar nature and putting them together. Looking at the social media task above, this is a creative writing task so is also similar to writing blog posts for example. (Well, freelance writers/authors look at “creative writing” differently than other online solo business owners do, so let’s change the descriptor here to “content marketing.”) We can take both of these tasks and add them to a “Content marketing” batch. We take the momentum that we already started with the social media writing and we continue it over to the blog writing.

Different types of tasks require a different way of thinking and constantly switching between them is jarring for our brains.

Step 3: Delegate your batches to specific days – We might have multiple batches on a day, or we might just have one. (See a sample week’s batching in the article. ... I’ve evolved to doing weekly/monthly/annual admin tasks on Sunday afternoons. Perhaps a throwback to my dad, who owned a small car sales/repair business and did his admin tasks then, when the shop was closed and quiet.)

Step 4: Do the quickest task first – It can sometimes be hard to get started, and by doing the easiest thing first, you jumpstart the process and gradually build up momentum.

There’s more in this Tiny Empires article; read it on Indiehackers.com.

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3. FYI items

▪ To celebrate National Haiku Day today, Morning Brew is running a haiku contest. Submit your haiku here TODAY and they will share the best of the bunch tomorrow. The rules: Your poem must follow the conventional haiku format (5–7–5 syllable structure) and be centered around the topic of: cicadas. Source: Morning Brew

▪ Free webinar: AI in Book Publishing: what’s going on & what to do now – Thursday, April 25, 1:00 pm Eastern US Time. Join industry experts Jane Friedman, Rebecca Ackermann, and Andrea Guevara for a thoughtful conversation about AI, what’s going on and what is coming, how to protect yourself, and how AI might benefit your career too. Register for free

▪ The recording of “7 Steps to Building a Book Coaching Business with Jennie Nash” is now available. Watch on YouTube.

▪ Another recommended resource from the Tech Productivty issue above: “10 Exercises for those who SIT a lot” (and who are younger than I am!). Watch the video clips on Twitter.com.

Enjoy!

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To Your Writing Success,

Dana K Cassell

Editor

(Dana Cassell is founder of Writers-Editors Network, and has been freelancing/creating full-time for 47 years. In addition to writing, editing, and fact-checking for numerous business clients, she has published more than 2,000 articles and has ghosted or authored more than a dozen books.)

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