28: Tradeoffs: 5 Things I Was Terrible At While Writing Pivot

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What's Next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot the Only Move that Matters is yous Next One, which launches in September of 2016.

In this podcast I talk with peak performers to reverse engineer their most successful career. Pivots interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy and open the kimono on what happens behind the scenes of my book and business. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools and tactics. For show notes from this episode, visit jennyblake Me Podcast.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another behind the Book episode of the Pivot podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing five things I was terrible at while writing the book because any big project like this involves trade offs before we jump in. I'm really excited to be launching a course soon called Book Ninja 101. It's book Five Days of Live workshops with some very special guests to help take you from zero to momentum on a book that you've been thinking about. I'm going to share systems for researching, writing and editing, as well as some really special bonuses that I'm putting together for the launch in September, but you'll get early access. I'm also going to interview Jenny Nash who is in Book Editor going to teach us how to write a one page book pitch or book proposal. We're going to talk with Taylor Pearson who self published his book the End of Jobs to smash success. He sold 5,000 copies in the first month, 12,000 to date, and made 35,000 in resulting revenue, which is amazing for a self published project. Then finally I'm going to interview my editor at Penguin Random House, Natalie, about what she looks for to give a deal for traditional publishing. We would love to have you join us. It's 1:25 if you want to buy the course a la carte or if you sign up for Momentum, you'll get the course for free. You can learn more at Momentum. And if you just want to sign up for Book Ninja, go to bit ly bookninja101.

Okay, let's get into it. I'm just finishing up the paper edit called First Pass, which is where I get all the pages laid out and it's up to me to hand edit any final changes. My dad I was so grateful my dad took a look at a version of this, as did I. I'm just getting ready to turn it in. For some of you who listened to my previous behind the Book podcast, I shared about how many hours went into every edit and this first pass, I would say it's about 20 to 30 hours over the course of two weeks. So as I've been working on this, I reflected. I keep thinking to myself, at some point I've got to do a podcast on the things I was terrible at while writing a book because I want to be really straightforward about trade offs. And anytime you're going to take on a big project, I think deep down we all know that there may be trade offs. But I find it interesting to see what different people choose as their trade offs and how we all make it work. We all are juggling a lot in our lives. Let me also say before I jump in, I don't know if this is merely correlation, if these things that I chose as my trade offs or causation. So I don't know. I don't want to blame it on the book making me terrible at these things. Not nothing like that, but I happen to notice that during especially the last two years of writing and really intensely editing, these are the things that I let slide. Let's jump in. Number one Email. I was absolutely terrible at email while working on the book in multiple ways. 1. I took a really long time to reply a lot of the time, and I strive to reply to everything, but in some cases I just couldn't. And then the second part that I sort of failed at was it was a constant source of stress every time I was in an editing window, which would usually be about three weeks. You know, in the beginning it was like two months at a time. Toward the end I would have the book for three to four weeks at a time and my emails would just pile up uncontrollably in that time. I can't tell you how many times in the last two years I have written to someone saying hi so and so, terribly sorry for My delayed response and I'm writing to them a month later or someone has asked to hang out or get coffee and it seems like I just didn't even respond. And then all of a sudden, two months later, I'm popping back up.

At the time, I didn't even. I mean, this was sort of a catch 22. Because I'm a systems person. I knew that there has to be better systems I should not be bottlenecking. I've even created a course called Email exhale. It's a $10 toolkit, but.

Fried from working on the book that I just didn't. I didn't even have the energy to really overhaul my systems. And I tried. I do all kinds of stuff already, like labeling and canned responses and batching email and doing it as a task and Marisol helps me with some of it. But nonetheless, this was something that I felt constantly terrible at while I was working on the book. And it's only been as I start to wrap up the book that I'm more determined than ever to get better at email. And when I say better, I mean also not letting it be. I don't just mean Inbox zero. Actually, Inbox zero is not at all what I mean. I'm not a fan of that because I can't control how many emails are coming in. So I don't want to feel like a slave to my inbox where I have to get it to zero. To me, that's an arbitrary metric and it doesn't have to do with impact. What I care about is am I responding to emails that matter and that I want to respond to in a timely enough manner, but in one that doesn't necessarily take away from my deep work.

Kind of related to email. Let's call this item number two. I was pretty terrible at socializing. I will say not the worst. I definitely kept up with an inner circle of friends and family, but for the most part, I was a hermit. The last two years, there were so many months where I did the minimum as far as going out and here again people would make mutual intros or want to get coffee and it was never personal. The other person, but I just didn't have it in me and I felt really consistently like my book is my main priority and just everything else comes second for this period of time. That brings me to item number three, which is kind of related to the social aspect. Dating. I was horrible at dating. I'll say I am not a dater at all. Like, I don't date for sport. It's not fun to me. I cannot stand online dating. And you know, people can armchair psychologize me in the comments if you want, which please don't, but it used to be I was online dating back when it was taboo to say that you're online dating and now it's taboo to say that you don't like online dating. There's always someone saying, well, but my friend so and so got engaged or, well, have you tried this app? Or well, you just have to treat it like a job. I'm not into any of that. That doesn't work for me. So I like doing real life Tinder, which is what I call getting out of the and being a friendly person and traveling and meeting anyone. It doesn't have to be romantic connections like meeting anybody when I'm out and about is really fun to me. I love meeting people in the wild, as I call it, and embracing serendipity. And in general, I trust that if I'm not meeting someone, maybe it's not the time. This has taken me a while to get to this point, but I will say that while working on the book, there were so many nights and weekends where I could have gone out or I could have stayed out, and I didn't. I came home so that I could get a good night's sleep, wake up early in the morning and work on my book edit. I think a lot of my friends feel like I'm probably a broken record at this point, being like, you know, I can't, or I gotta go home early, I gotta work on the book, and I'm at the home stretch and I don't resent having to do that at all. But I'm just saying that the trade off here was that I really wasn't meeting very many new people during the last few years, and.

I dated for a few very short bursts. But.

There was a part of me that felt like in a way, it could also be divinely ordered in the sense that I really have given so much to this project and I truly do not try and say that it has to be. These things are mutually exclusive. One can either write a book or meet someone great and. Or you can write a book or be in a relationship. I really do not think in those linear black and white terms, but I'll just share the pattern that I noticed, which is that for the last two years and three since I started thinking about the book, but let's say two years of really intense writing and editing, that my dating life has been, like, pretty quiet. So I Look forward because I've just been mostly a hermit. And when I do leave the house, it's either to see my inner circle, as I mentioned, or to go to yoga and Pilates, to work out, to go for a walk. There was not a lot. I didn't feel like I had a lot of space to be meeting a lot of new people.

That brings me to item number four, which is fresh air. I was really terrible at getting fresh air. And that's a funny thing to say. I literally mean air. I don't mean the NPR podcast.

While working on the book, there were so many weekends where I would say, spend all day Saturday and or Sunday, at least until the afternoon inside writing. And this kind of kills me when it's nice out, especially here in New York. I grew up in California. It was always nice out. But in New York, in the winter, it's much easier to stay inside and feel cozy and write and edit and do all that all day. And there aren't as many people being social. But I got real FOMO when spring and summer would roll around and I would be like, oh, I'm working on a book edit. I have to gotta stay indoor. And, you know, maybe there's someone more badass than I am about their time management. Like, I know there are people who will wake up at 4am and do what it takes to, like, work from 4 to 8 or 4 to 10. And there were days that I did that. I mean, my ideal is to go to bed at 9 and wake up at 5. But I started to notice, especially later in the process, that I was really tired. I started to just get really tired. And I'm conscious about not reaching a point of burnout. I really try and monitor my body's signals long before I hit that brick wall of burnout. You can listen. I recorded a podcast on Vertigo back in November where I got slammed by vertigo. For three days, I could not stand upright. Standing upright just to even get dressed made me want to throw up. In one case, I tried to walk down the street to get a bagel and I did throw up. It was insane. And so I took that at the time as my body's message saying, slow down, be horizontal for a few days, switch to green juice. I actually haven't had coffee since. I just lost the taste for it. And so getting fresh air and exercise, it was more challenging than it was for me in the past. And those are big values of mine. So that's why I even bring it up. But the point is, I'm not willing to sacrifice my sleep to do other things. So the trade off that I made was, yes, that means I'm probably staying indoors more than I would like during the day more than I would like. I also somehow my energy shifted during this time and I was meditating a lot more. I'm coming up on a hundred consecutive days, which I'm very proud of. And so meditation has been, like, really joyful for me in the last.

Couple years. I mean, really in tandem with working on the book. But I also noticed I was in a less aggressive yoga practice, so I really switched my yoga around and I just wasn't working out as vigorously because I think I. I don't know. It's crazy that working on a big project can create this amount of mental tiredness, which translates to even physical tiredness. And again, like, not complaining, just sort of sharing the realities of it. So I'd say I put on a good 10 book pounds.

Which is not the book's fault, but I'm saying from sitting more, from being indoors more, from generally feeling a little bit tired and spent.

The priority shifted from my life revolving around awesome workouts to fitting in restorative yoga when I could. Things ebb and flow, so it's no big deal. But I look forward to having more energy to just get outside more, be more social and work out. And the interesting thing is gonna be balancing that and not overbooking myself as soon as this really intense, deep work, as Cal Newport would call it, is done. Because I know it's kind of like going to a salad bar buffet. Scheduling wise. Right now, it seems like, oh, I've been a hermit for two years. Let me book up my schedule for the fall, book this, do a whole book tour, but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. And that's. Sometimes my eyes are bigger than my stomach, both at a solid bar buffet and also with my schedule. So that will be an interesting challenge. The last area that I was pretty terrible at was social media. This goes hand in hand with email. But of all the things that had to drop, this was really high up there for me. I generally don't feel like I feel better after I've been scrolling around on Facebook. It usually gives me this weird feeling of anxiety. And again, I could psychoanalyze myself, but really, I just feel like it's not necessarily for me. And so at least to be proactively on it a lot. Every now and then I'll post or I'll check in, but yeah, I was Pretty terrible at proactively posting pictures or keeping people posted on my progress or tweeting a lot and responding to things. And it feels kind of bad, you know, I don't want to be the asshole that's like doesn't interact with other people or doesn't know what my friends are up to. But I just felt like I've really. I'm in this deep inward mode and I'm trying to focus and write the book and that I didn't want to scatter or diffuse my attention across too many things. And I was already feeling so hard at email and like keeping up with my inner circle of closest friends and family that I was just maxed out. There just didn't seem to be room for that. And so yeah, I feel, I feel kind of bad. Like there were, you know, there were many moments where I would run into someone. Well, did you hear about so and so on Facebook or did you know that so and so got married or these huge life events that I didn't know about? And I don't know the answer to that because I just value a really quiet day. And social media tends to create more noise, so I'm still figuring out the right balance. But I can definitely say that I was terrible at that while writing the book, if not just terrible at that generally, which is kind of silly because I have a public facing profile, if you will. So it seems like I should be good at social media or should use it more than I do, but still figuring that out. Stay tuned. I feel like my most social media is writing a book that instead of the thousand updates that I didn't post the last three years, I created a book and my hope is that that is social, that that will get out and that has bigger ideas and that I can connect with people through that and maybe someone, you can all just give me a pardon on the aspects of social media that I'm not great at.

All. Right, that wraps up the list of things I was terrible at while writing the book. At least the things that are top of mind. I'm sure there are many more I'm not even realizing. And it's just interesting to look at this. Anyone who has, who's in a relationship or lives with someone or has a pet or kids, I mean you have to make trade offs all the time. And so I think it's really interesting how we all juggle what we've got going on and make room for big projects like this. I would love to hear from you. So holla at me in the show notes. You can find those at jennyblake Me Podcast. I'm on Twitter ennyblake and I'm much more attentive now that the book is done and I would love to have you join us for the five day Live Book Ninja series. So learn more about that at bit ly bookninja101 or you'll get the course for free if you enroll in Momentum and you can learn more about that. It's my private online community for side hustlers and solopreneurs. That's@MomentumCrew.com we've got all kinds of goodies in there, every course and every template I've ever created. A monthly live workshop in addition to this special book Ninja 101 series and private 20 minute office hours. Calls with me once a quarter if you want them. So we would love to have you join. Last but not least, if you want to keep up with with everything that's going on behind the book and business, I encourage you to sign up for my twice monthly newsletter where I send out curated lists of what I'm reading, watching, listening to and my favorite new tools that I'm geeking out on. That is @jennyblake me updates. Thanks so much for listening everyone and Happy Spring.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit JennyBlake me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter @jennyblake. And remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always Facebook.