I tend to do my editorial planning by quarters (2012Q4 that kind of quarter) for work, and six months in advance for clients. Somehow I always get blindsided by some crazy last minute requests or speaking gigs that I feel compelled to jump through hoops for. Try as I might, I can’t always convince others that preplanning is less stressful and produces generally better results.
To that end, I have decided that I will create a work calendar for ME for use by ME and controlled by ME. This is a perk of being in charge of my own career.
So, over this outwardly slow time between Christmas and New Years I will be working away on plotting my own deliberate charts on where I am heading, what I will be publishing, and who I will be working with going forward in 2013. Strangely what I feel like doing is writing. Maybe that’s a distraction tactic my brain is throwing at me. It could be the residual pain from my latest knee surgery (Vicodin isn’t as fun to take as I thought it would be). In any case, the end of the year always feels like renewal time for me and is very inspiring. To be honest I prefer to do all this ‘soul searching’ and planning in July when no one else is doing it.
Something else that ties in closely with me structuring my next 3-6 months of online professional activity is that I may very well give up being self-employed. A few months back I wanted to see about jumping ship on being self-employed (after 14 or so years of it) and work for a larger company or agency. It seems I am getting my wish in a “dipping my toe in the water” kind of way.
I will be working with a consortium of other small businesses to provide solutions to some very real digital media problems facing companies of all sizes. We will behave like a sort of swat team, coming together for big projects and hard problems, and then disbanding to work on our own company’s projects again. I am also (strongly considering) working with a business incubator to help develop, educate and mentor startup businesses (not startups – totally different). I’ve had offers for employment at numerous companies including in-house marketing teams and boutique agencies, but nothing has quite motivated me enough to want to leave self-employment. I’m looking to make the jump to make a much bigger impact on my industry than I can currently as a solopreneur. I’m not saying working on my own discredits me from sweet projects, but running the entire show on my own does. I’ve still got some time to make decisions and solidify opportunities for myself. If I choose not to take any offers and keep chuggin’ along on my own, that will be great too, and not a failure of any kind. I will just have just keep all the ‘awesome’ to myself!
