Business planning, to be exact. Right now, I am neck deep in business planning for the future of my publishing business that I’m launching into in a few months.

I used to be seriously good at planning my writing each year, as it was part of the requirement for the training and career planning for my old Evil Day Job. Every year I had a set number of goals to help me reach my bigger dream goal of becoming a full time writer. I have to say, once I wrote those plans down, they always had a way of falling into place. Unfortunately, I haven’t been very good at keeping up with my planning over the last year and a half.

So in knowing that, I’m busy focusing on my proper business plan for Dwell Press, who I will be publishing under. It’s hard work, don’t get me wrong. But there are some serious benefits to writing these things down. I think that somewhere along the way of writing business plans, the goals and milestones just start to become ingrained inside your mind so you are always working towards what you have planned.

Of course life is going to get in the way of your plans sometimes, and that’s totally normal. But having them set in place is a very good first step in the greater scheme of things. I need to know how much money I need to make off publishing before I can justify giving up working the Evil Day Job. And I need to know a realistic number of how much I can release each year, and what those releases should look like. I also want to significantly increase my blog following while I’m at it. There is nothing quite like the thought of hard work to motivate me into action.

I love it.

Dreams are there to be made into reality. Chasing a dream, makes life worth living. I don’t want to be on my deathbed and have a crapload of regrets of the things I didn’t do. So designing a new business plan, and getting a few things in place to help me achieve those things is precisely what I need to do.