February is an awkward month. All those writer resolutions I made in January begin to look a bit bedraggled four weeks later.

I started out well.

“Just grab a pen,” chirped my internal Time Manager. “Get those tasks out of your head and onto a pad of paper.”

My Time Manager knows my internal weakness. I love lists. So, I made a long list of the many things I know I ought to do more often as an indie writer. Marketing. Branding. Social Media. Graphic design research for ads and so I can recognize what makes a good book cover. Keyword Management. Research related to the Business of Writing.

But these are all big umbrella type topics. So, I made a second more detailed list of “things I need to get done in order to get other things done.”

Then, just to be completely thorough, I transferred each of these writer resolutions tasks to index cards.

I love index cards even more than I love lists. And there were a lot of those cards. I color coordinated them – yellow for daily items, blue for weekly ones. I noted which day each week I should do them and how much time I should spend on each task. They made a satisfyingly fat stack.

I was feeling pretty smug until I realized I had forgotten cards for five crucial tasks.

But my internal Time Manager was right. Filling out those index cards had cleared enough mental space for me to remember the obvious: Observing. Thinking. Reading. Staring at nothing. And most important, writing.

These activities are the reason I do this author boogie. The rest is commentary. Doesn’t mean I’ll never tackle that fat pile of index cards, but I think I’ll prioritize for my personal Big Five.

Rose Grey is hard at work on her first scifi romance novel. Visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. The Closer You Get, All Of Me, Waiting For You, Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are contemporary romance novels available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.