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Almost as soon as I resolved to write professionally, I realized that I should start setting goals for my writing and tracking my production and progress.

My need to track my goals and production was not born of self-improvement 101.  Instead, this drive to organize my time grew from some minor terrors that had made themselves visitors in my heart, unannounced and certainly unwelcome.  Do I have too many projects on my plate?  Can I master enough basic skills quickly enough to start making a living?  Am I crazy for even trying, or should I just take out some house hunters and scare up an escrow or go back to writing software for someone?

More than anything else, I was afraid that if I didn’t make explicit room for the fiction work, I would tend to ignore it in favor of work that wasn’t so emotionally loaded with uncertainty and risk.  So if you need a reason to set goals and track your progress, feel free to steal my reason.  Goal setting and progress tracking are a boring, self-imposed task that you do to make room for the good stuff in your writing (whatever "the good stuff" means to you). 

For those of you who might also want to steal my process as well as my motivation, here’s how I did it.

How I Got Started Tracking My Goals

Sunday at Borders I sat down and started writing all my current projects in my journal.  For each project, I tried to estimate how much time each one would take.  There are several blogs I’m working on, for example, and each of these needed so many posts at so many hours each.  Since I’m trying to improve my blog writing while I’m trying to understand the time I spend, and since I have a goal of writing longer posts, I gave myself two hours per blog post.   (I know I often bang out shorter works in a half hour, but again, the goal is to go long).  Knowing how many posts I want to publish for each blog monthly or weekly, I was able to come up with hours per week per blog.

At the same time, I’m running another business, so I entered the number of (non-writing) hours I need to devote to that.  There’s some overlap here in my case, because I also blog for my business.

In addition to my current blogging efforts and business, I also wrote down two types of writing that I’m working on writing and selling:  short fiction and Private Label Rights articles (including blogging subscription) work.  I allocated ten hours per week for each of those categories.

So when I was done my list of hours and projects looked something like this, with real blog names in place of "blog 1", etc.

07 hours blog 1
05 hours blog 2
02 hours blog 3
10 hours fiction work
10 hours PLR work
05 hours existing business
06 hours blog 4
___________________________

45 hours total per week

To me, it’s very important to understand that every time you list your goals, you’re working on an experiment for your life that should be short term.  Fans of David Allen’s Getting Things Done will recall that one of the most important disciplines he recommends is the weekly review, where you fine tune your list of projects and next actions.  I believe a week is an excellent unit of planning, and my goal eventually is to add another ten hour block to the week such as "magazine writing".  It can either replace one of the ten hour blocks that’s there now if an activity doesn’t pan out either emotionally or financially, or I may decide that four blogs is about two or three blogs too many.

Whether forty-five hours is a realistic work week is another open issue.  Sure, it’s less than the fifty I had thought would be my maximum, but in practice even forty-five may be overly aggressive.  Let’s face it, the first and most destructive thing that happens to any beautiful written schedule is real life.  Sure enough, almost to prove the point, the first thing that happened to me on Monday morning with the beautiful schedule I created on Sunday was an email with a potential for about three days worth of paid interruption. 

That’s fine.  Next week I will experiment with my life again.

Tracking My Production and Progress

When Monday rolled around, I shifted the focus from planning the week to tracking a few core details I wanted to track for each of the projects listed above.  I quickly tried out a couple of a task-timer style programs downloaded from the Internet.  I’m using AllNetic’s Working Time Tracker for now.  If it doesn’t work out, I’ll resort to writing down start times and stop times on a pad, since often the simplest solution is best.  (The goal is to start working, not to spend the day fiddling with software).

One other "tracking tool" that I put together in a  few seconds was a brain dead simple Excel Spread sheet with the following column headers:

The first column is meant to record whatever title I worked on, or it can be a task, in which case it’s just a note reminding me of what I was doing.  The second column is the project or blog (from the list above).  Date is of course the date the work was done, and time spent is simply the elapsed time for that task that day.  Next come the number of words written.  Finally, quality is simply a subjective letter grade for the story or work.

Keep It Simple

Whatever system you set up and use, make sure it’s simple and easy to use.  It can be as easy as a diary.  Getting organized is not an end in itself, and it should never be so complex that it detracts from the good stuff.  The goal of setting goals is to distract from the good stuff, but to give it the time it needs to flower and grow.

Occasional Internet real estate marketing blogger, John Lockwood, who had been missing from his blog for several weeks, was found today at his keyboard.  Doctors commented that for someone suffering from exposure, he looked surprisingly well fed.

The rescue team that was sent out to find Lockwood had little comment on the discovery.  Rescue dog handler, Norbert Dimwhistle, had this to say about his dogs’ discovery:  "I don’t know.  Usually when the dogs sniff someone out, they get all excited and bark their heads off.  With Lockwood they just curled up nearby and went to sleep.  I don’t think he’s all that exciting."

Hi There, John Lockwood Here

Well, it looks like "The Onion" won’t be hiring any new writers soon.

January and February were somewhat busy months in real estate, with me working with several buyers of my own — sometimes productively and sometimes not.  So part of the answer to the question of where I’ve been has been that I’ve been selling a house and driving around a lot.

As soon as things wound down a bit at the end of February, naturally I couldn’t just show up here and work on business interest #2.  No, dumb time-management school dropout that I am, at that point I had to stick another iron in the fire, a brand new blog about writing, Inklit.com.

Oh yes, and I almost forgot:  while I was missing I also invented the Real Estate Johnosphere.

As Warren Buffet remarked famously:  Diversification is for the ignorant.  I plead guilty.

Now you know why he’s a billionaire and I put search and rescue dogs to sleep.

I began blogging about writing as a career partly to have a journal of my writing work, but even more importantly as a personal exploration into writing markets.

One of the first new ideas I bumped into was the concept of PLR writing.  PLR stands for "Private Label Rights".  PLR articles are written once and then sold to multiple web site owners, each of whom purchases the rights to use the article as is or modify it as needed and then "privately label" the article as their own.  As Courtney Ramirez points out, PLR articles are commonly sold as filler for Adsense web sites.

Freelance writer and trainer Angela Booth has also written extensively about PLR writing, including her article on Writing and Selling PLR Content.  Angela’s article does a great job of making the case for PLR content as an first rate business model for an online writing career.  She also gets into more detail than Ramirez on the PLR licensing model.

Of course, not everyone likes PLR.  To answer the PLR critics, CatalystBlogger’s Jennifer Williamson wrote a fine article recently entitled PLR:  Legitimate Business Model or Morally Bankrupt.  Jennifer examines some of the controversy among Freelance writers surrounding PLR articles.  As a real estate broker in my other life, much of this debate reminds me of the debate around discount brokers.   As Jennifer points out, one of the problems with PLR writing is that it’s cheap.  So at least part of the backlash against PLR articles stems from a purely financial consideration:  people can pay less for them than for custom work.

At this point in my exploration, my own position is that I’m fairly ambivalent about PLR.  On the one hand, the combination of writing SEO-optimized copy together with the opportunity to distribute my work online is a natural fit for my current background as a real estate web site author/webmaster/blogger.  On the other hand, at least a part of my motivation for exploring new writing outlets was that I wanted to escape the daily grind of "pimping to the search engines".  That being the case, you’d be hard pressed to find a worse example of "moving in the wrong direction" than becoming a PLR Guru.  Just call me Stephen King to the Sploggers.  (Or is that Gore Vidal of Viagra?).

I don’t say PLR’s wrong for everyone.  I certainly don’t find fault with those for whom it’s a lucrative living.  I’m not even saying it’s wrong for me at this point.

I find it an interesting addition to the march of business models.

I’d no sooner written my first post here than I began to look for other blogs who had more than one post plus hello world put together.

There are a lot of them, and it looks like I’m late to the party.  That’s all right.  I just hope there’s still food. 

There are more "writing blogs" than there are "real estate blogs", at least according to Google.  The difference is approximately twenty-one million to fourteen million.  Or make that 3:2 times seven million.

That’s a lot of activity.

When I looked around to see who was early to the writing-about-writing party, I realized that I’d stopped writing and started blogging.

What’s The Difference Between Blogging and Other Writing?

1. It’s a Social Activity
   I look at blogging as a sort of party-drunk edge of writing.  Writing by its nature is somewhat solitary, whereas much of blogging always seems to run the risk of devolving into a cocktail party on a good day, or a brawl on a bad one.  This is not to say that blogging is not a legitimate writing career path.  My own writing career is being sponsored by my blogging revenue. 
2. It Combines the Role of Author and Publisher
   One way to look at blogging is that it is a form of sweat-equity self-publishing.  As the publisher as well as the writer, you spend a lot of time on sales, promotion, and distribution — work that a lot of time feels dangerously like "mere socializing".  Much of our activity as bloggers serves the same sales-related function as a book signing or author interview would in traditional publishing.
3. Its Often — Though Not Always — of Poor Quality
   Because blogs are not vetted in any way and needn’t be "sold" to a publisher or editor before they appear, there’s a huge variation in quality among them.  I don’t mean to idealize print writing as some sort of uniform quality utopia, but editors, agents and publishers do serve an important function of quality control that simply disappears in an online environment.
4. It May Not Even Have a Human Reader In Mind
   One of the functions of blogging that has fed me quite well in some of my work is establishing my expertise and credibility on a topic not for human consumption, but for computer algorithms — notably search engines.  I suppose that writing pieces meant to promote the author somehow are nothing new, but I can’t think of any historical parallel where a writer sought the approval of a mechanism.  This is just plain weird.

What’s Beyond Blogging?

One of the domain names I considered using for this site promoted the idea that this blog would be about forms of writing that are outside of or beyond mere blogging.  In the end I’m quite happy that I didn’t take the blog in that direction, but I am trying to see how well, and to what extent, blogging fits into my overall writing career.  I don’t see any need to bite a hand that’s fed me just because other hands beckon.

To paraphrase an old sixties joke about drugs and reality, above all I hope that blogs are not just a crutch for those who can’t handle fiction.  I’m not sure that spending some time working on fiction and continuing to blog are mutually exclusive.  I made a fair amount of progress on two stories and discarded a third in about ten hours or so.  I see no reason to lock myself in at this stage.  On a strictly business level, picking one or two areas to try to master may be far more productive than trying to take on the whole field in a hot week. 

OK, look, let’s start crossing stuff off:  no poetry or novels in 2008 unless absolutely necessary.

There.  I feel more focused already.

Inklit is a blog about writing as a career.  It has just come into the world like any newborn, slick and helpless and stupid about what it will become.  As though struggling for oxygen, it’s the wrong shade of blue. 

Inklit was born at 11:00 AM on Saturday, March 1st, 2008.

I had an idea about my writing career, and my idea gave Inklit life.  I already have a career as a professional writer of sorts.  I am a blogger, pimping used houses to the search engines.  This pays the bills, but all by itself it’s not very satisfying.  So I thought I would enjoy doing more with my writing career and my life.  With this idea, I began to write some stories.

The idea that I would share what I learn about writing as a career gave Inklit life. 

Maybe you haven’t made any money writing yet.  Or maybe like me you’ve done some writing as a career, and now you want to get better at your writing work, and explore new formats and new markets.

That’s what this blog is about.  Welcome.

One of the elusive goals that I’ve had for my business for many years is to improve our customer service and our follow-up on leads while centralizing my company’s database of clients.

That’s why I was very excited this week when I took a second look at 37signal’s product HighRise.  The first time I looked at HighRise it struck me as a bit simplistic, but this time around it dawned on me that I may have found a solution that does about 99% of what I expect and need it to do, and does it elegantly and affordably.

Tracking IHomeFinder Leads

One of the core features of HighRise is its ability to work superbly well with email.   Elite Properties has several real estate web sites that I’ve developed over the years, and all the most productive ones are running IHomefinder IDX.  For some time now the workflow has looked like:  leads come in to my computer, and I either handle them myself or have my email software (Eudora) forward them to the agent on duty.  This works tolerably well, but as a broker needless to say I’m always looking out for a way to increase our conversion rate, and I also want to know that the leads my company has spent lots of time developing (through hard earned blogging / SEO sweat equity) are followed up efficiently.  Moreover, the system falls down somewhat if an agent is out on a listing appointment or showing property, since when that happens the leads tend to just sit in their inbox all day.

This problem brings us to a core feature of HighRise, the "dropbox", which is a kind of intelligent mailbox that can read incoming email that’s forwarded to it, figure out who it was forwarded from, and either create a new record for that contact or add the email information to the existing contact.  So now instead of forwarding to the agents, which I was already doing, I can simply tell Eudora to forward them to HighRise, and Highrise will instantly create a contact record for the lead, or add it to the contact history that already exists.  It doesn’t get every field in the right place (such as phone numbers in the lead), but since the email text is sent along with it, it’s easy to just paste things into the right place.

In addition to email tracking, HighRise allows you to very easily keep notes on conversations and calls, and track tasks you might want to schedule such as follow up calls or emails or property showings.  The UI design is mostly elegantly simple and uncluttered, with the tools right where you need them to be.

Tag, You’re It!

HighriseHQ you can "tag" a contact with pretty much any keyword you want, and the tags are pretty much like the blog tags that many of my readers here will be familiar with from "Tag Clouds".  One of the uses I like for Tags is that it allows me to assign a lead to an individual using their name, or to mark it as "Open" so the first agent to be available can claim it.  No doubt once you get in to the software you’ll find lots of uses for tags.

The Down Side

HighRise lives and dies by simplicity.  The fact that it does a few things extremely well and poses a practically non-existent learning curve is a core feature.  On the other hand, once in awhile you find yourself wishing it would do some things better or be a bit more configurable.  Although there’s an API available for developers, if you’re a non-programming power user you’ll find that you either like what it does, or you don’t, because you aren’t going to be changing it much.  I’m sure a lot of this comes from its developers being a Ruby on Rails shop.  Ruby on Rails is a web development tradition noted for an extreme minimalism.  This can be great on a tools level, but one might argue that minimalism outlives its usefulness when it seeps into the product.

One feature I would like, for example, relates to upcoming tasks.  When you create tasks, they show up in a view that tells you what’s scheduled today, next week, later, etc., and the dates are displayed (without days of the week!) but as soon as you have four or five tasks in there, you find yourself wishing for a calendar view so you can see them graphically.  Another feature that would be nice is to display times along with dates for notes and contact creation.  Also, HighRise’s dropboxes work fine with plain text emails, but they strip links out of HTML emails.  As a result, those easy-to-use links that IHomefinder provides to log in and see what homes a potential client is looking at go away.  A workaround for that is to also forward the lead to a separate shared email account, but naturally that’s a bit of a hack.

Overall Impressions

On balance, for me the simplicity and ease of use of HighRise and its ability to "do the right thing" with a new lead far outweigh the features it lacks.  Add to that the fact that getting a team of a half dozen agents up and running will set you back only about $24 per month compared to $210 per month for Top Producer, and HighRise’s minimalism becomes if anything even more exciting.  We’re in the middle of rolling it out and I will let you know how it goes!