I never seem to have a solid plan or topic when I start these posts but I am trying to push myself to continue posting on a regular basis once a week. So once again we (myself included) will just have to see where this post takes us.
In an effort to gear up for the holiday season I made a rather large on-line purchase of some new items with multiple quantities from Dollar Days. I have mentioned this site in another post regarding where I find stuff to sell. I am a little nervous about the re-sell-ability (is that a word? Anyway you know what I mean) of these items but time will tell. I haven't received any of the items yet they are due to arrive next week.
If you have read my previous post you will be familiar with the pink shoes vs the backpacks competition and you will have a better understanding of good purchasing and bad purchasing decisions that I have made.
Also if you have been following along with my last few posts you will be aware that I have been a little concerned and whinny about my sales numbers and my commitment level. Well I am happy to report that for two weeks in a row I have worked my 20 hours and sales do seem to have picked back up so I am hopeful that both of these trends will continue through the holiday season at least.
Making sure that I put in at least 20 hours per week should be something that I can control. Following are a few small changes that I made that seem to have helped.
1) Of course the first thing I did was to make myself painfully aware of how infrequently I have actually worked 20 hours a week since the first of the year.
2) Rather than just saying I need to work 20 hours per week I broke it down by day. Planning to work 6 hours per day on tuesday, thursday and friday for a total of 18 hours and the remaining 2 hours sometime in the other 4 days of the week.
3) I used to tell myself on a particular day that I would work until a specif amount of work was done. For examples when I had listed x-number of items or photographed x number of things. I think this resulted in my either burning out because the chunk of work was too big or in my skating by because the amount of work was too small.
4) I also used to work on Ebay stuff for awhile and then do something else thinking that I would go back to Ebay later. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. For the last couple of weeks I have put in my 6 hours in one chunk of time. Sometimes I don't finish as much as I want to but I let myself stop when my time is up.
Maybe this system won't work forever but for now it seems to be effective.
In other happy news I sold this item (my halloween costume from last year) for a nice little sum. It was just taking up space in my closet.
Happy Ebaying,
