Nicola Cairncross is back from a Write Club Lite meeting, where they get together and do anything BUT write. Planning future episodes of the podcast, doing a drama workshop, talking about writing, but not actually writing. Nicola concludes that, in order to get something done, you have to actually set aside time to do it and “just get the file out”.
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On the blogs
Vzine 072 | Alexa Skills Goes Live!
Vzine 071 | Allowing Creative Force
Own It! 185 | Toxic People
Own It! 184 | Am I A Copycat?
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Well, welcome to this week’s vzine. I’ve got some apologies to make. I’m ever so sorry, the birds were really loud last week, and so were the cicadas, and there was that abrupt ending to section number one.
That’s because I was at Write Club today, and the girls were texting me, or messaging me on Slack to say I’m repeating myself, as usual, and which bit shall they cut out. Well they made an executive decision, and I’m grateful for that, because I was not contactable at the time, but anyway, it did end a bit abruptly.
As you can hear, tonight was really quiet on the balcony. It’s this evening, it’s lovely. Gin and tonic time, you see? But just as I come out here, the scrap metal man decides to come past, and sets all the dogs off.
The Alexa Skill has gone live, and it’s doing very well. It’s a live on all platforms, including Amazon, so if you go to ClicksAndLeads365.com, you’ll find it on Alexa, and you can get your smart speaker to deliver me talking to you every morning for just a minute, giving you a little bit of motivation, and marketing, and business stuff, and a bit of money stuff as well, and I hope you really enjoy it, and if you do, would you give us a review? I’d love to hear from you, and I’d love to see your reviews.
But let’s get on with the show, shall we? Taking of advantage of a momentary lapse in the yapping from up the hill, I’d like to talk to you today, again, about procrastination, because I’ve just been to a Write Club The Podcast meeting.
It’s a Write Club The Podcast meeting lite – we call it that because it’s one where we don’t actually do any writing, we just talk about why we haven’t done any writing. And I’ve got to say that the hardest thing I’ve ever done is try to make myself write a novel, and it’s hard because every single time I sit down to do some of it, I am distracted by just about everything else, because making something up out of your head is really, really difficult.
I find it easier to write poems, I’ve discovered, than write a novel, and so does everyone else in my group. They will find anything easier than writing a novel.
One of them has actually finished a book, and she’s now shopping it around for an agent, the other one has nearly finished a book, but she’s distracting herself by going off and writing something else entirely. One person has got a book out to an editor, and so she’s starting to write book two, so that’s fine, we’ll let her off, and the other one has been writing a book for years, not just months, years, and she is finding any reason at all not to finish it.
So it is common among writers, and I think I didn’t believe it, the writer’s block thing, until I tried it for myself.
The other thing I’m finding really difficult at the moment is sitting down and recording seven one minute tips for the Alexa Skills things. I’m fine once I get into the flow, once I sit down and get started with one or two, and then I can just rattle off the rest of them quite easily, but I think they thing is to actually sit down and just get the file out, as one of my earliest mentors said, because if you’re in the right place, and you just get the file out, you’re very lucky to continue, you’re very likely, sorry, to continue with the task you’ve set yourself when you sat down, but if you don’t go anywhere near your desk in the first place, then it’s obviously going to be harder to write a book than if you actually sit down, and try and write at your desk.
So what are you procrastinating about right now? What could you make easier by batching? What could you be more likely to get into your flow doing if you spent some actual time?
My writing club ladies have said to me that my book’s not going to get written unless I block off one whole day for writing. Even if I don’t spend the whole day writing, I’m much more likely to get something written if I sit down at the desk with the intention of writing something.
So I’m going to take heed, and I’m going to decide which day of the week is a writing day, and that’s got to be that I get out of the bed in the morning, and I go and sit at my desk, and I spend some time writing, even if it’s not the whole day, because it is something I want to do, it is something I enjoy doing once I get there, once I get into the flow, but you can’t get into the flow if you’re not actually in the place where the action happens.
Bringing this back to a business thing, I think that so many people find it really difficult to create social media content, and every single person I’ve found that finds it easier, are the people who batch it, are the people who sit down and say I’m going to record six, nine, twelve pieces of content all at once, and then I’m going to do the different kind of flow tasks that involve leveraging the social content out.
I hope this helps you if you’ve been procrastinating. I’d love to hear from you, as long as you don’t bark at me, that’d be really good, and do feel free to leave comments and questions, and tell me what you’re procrastinating about in the comments below.
You can do that on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, on the blog, and I monitor all of those comments myself personally, and I will reply, I promise, and try and help you.
So what’s on the blog or the podcast this week, you may be asking yourself. I’d like to tell you. On episode 184 of Own It!, we’re talking about whether you’re a copycat or not.
One of our clients wrote in, and said she wanted to talk on the same topic as someone else she liked and respected enormously, and did we feel that she would be being a copycat by doing so. She was also concerned about what the person concerned might think of her for talking about the same topics, because this other person managed to carve out quite a niche for herself in the space.
So hear what we recommend on episode 184 of ownitthepodcast.com.
On vzine number 72, we’re talking about voice search, because that’s the topic I’m totally obsessed with at the moment, and our Alexa Skills went live, and why voice search will be important to your business in the near future.
So go and check it out on NicolaCairncross.com/Blog, and look for vzine number 72, and you can find out all about it. That’s if for this week. Thanks for watching.
Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun
Intro Music
Pool Cosby
Incidental Music
Chill Motivational Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Instrumental – The Process // No Copyright Music
Chill Lo-Fi Hip-Hop – Midnight Bounce (Lakey Inspired) Relaxing “Copyright Free” lofi Hip-hop Music
Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas
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