The three tasks of the self-publishing entrepreneur

I have finally managed to find a day that is free from work and family. The kids will be in daycare, so I will be free from that wonderful distraction. And bar any crisis at work, no job either. Which is not certain, because the job I have is full of crisises. There is no testing going on at the time though. I will have a full day of editing and publishing. 

My biggest problem that I can see is that the editing software that I want is not available on the Mac with the new appstore. They prohibit you from downloading free software. Much as I love the Mac, this is annoying. Even though I can understand the logic, being in software, I do not think it is good. It is on the verge of finally taking that old Mac and turn it into a Linux machine, so I can do what I want with it. I keep wanting to play around with Devstack, there are so many cool things to discover in OpenStack, not to speak of Linux. 

Actually, that should probably be the second biggest problem. The biggest problem is time. Finding it. Because I have decided that this is the lowest priority - after family and work. And triplets take a lot of time. 

I tried different kinds of tactics: work a few hours away from home on weekends, work after the kids have fallen asleep, work during my commute. The first two are actually a bad idea. I worked so much that I got pneumonia from exhaustion. And I did not get to see my kids nearly as much as I would like. The worst thing is that working is a huge stress factor. I want to switch off when I leave the office. So I gave that up. And scaled back. 

That leaves the commute. I work from home a lot, so I do not have to go to the office every day. That gives me an hour on the way to work, and sn hour going home. The travel time is longer, but I have to change trains a couple of times, so the effective time available for working is about an hour. 

In the six to eight hours per week I have to spend on building a business, or maybe it is my hobby right now, I said in the previous installment that I had three tasks: 

* maintain the presence I have and enhance it

* build a sales funnel

* build products to put in the funnel

How does that break down in reality? 

The presence I have is mainly based on Twitter, so I need to spend a few minutes on that every day. And then I have a blog, but I should retire that and focus on the general web presence. It only gets one or two visitors per week, no matter how I promote it in social media. That is probably something I have to do on that single day I have to work on the business. 
I probably spend proportionally too much time on Twitter, but it is fun to interact with people. And I like the Twitter format. I need to start building an email list so I am not dependent on Twitter for reaching my audience.