It takes a long journey to accomplish a routine, then take it to other levels. Making the project needed a focus on business, and by going through the experiences of Professional Driving. Much of the routine was building spreadsheet for each individual activity of the profession. The next level was keeping records of the financial aspect of the “business” (I am calling it a business, since the understanding of building records for any given business is the goal and concept of this project), and then, the third level is to show graphs and charts to evaluate each year. The last two aspects of the project was to put to use, the information to project the future timeline of the business.

I started out with a fight to understand this profession, build the endurance to do the profession, and also build up to all the records keeping (in it’s raw form), and make the time to actually build a common spread sheet for any user that they can modify to serve their purpose. When working with spreadsheets, it takes the understanding that “It will always be a work in progress”. I am no exception. With each year, I improved on the information to keep track of, and had to decide when to go back to the older spreadsheets and add information with relationship to it’s time period of data. At current, the next aspect of work is to bring all this information together, before even getting to building useful charts and evaluate and compare the work over the periods of years. Even the evaluation will by more open to criticism, since every year there will be random and ever-changing elements and activities that affected the results for that time period.

In one of my Blogs, I wrote about the log book in the form of story telling. In that same aspect, even records keeping is a story being told. What makes it understandable is how it is formatted and detailed, and the more details, the better a story is told. With that in mind, there are three types of stories to be told, all on one subject. That was a concept. The three books (stories) would be the trip, mapping, and planning of Professional Driving; the second book is all financial; the third, would be on projecting all three stories to be told, and what could be in the future. A collection of books put in one booklet is called a “bible”. Each part of this bible has an interest to certain groups of readers. Obviously, the financial story to be kept (told) is for the bank, revenue agencies, shareholders, etc., while the mapping version would be anyone traveling and wish to keep a record for the next journey in that area in the unforeseen future. Building the future projections and possibilities allows a mix of these groups (both financial and journeymen) to know where you are trying to go. Knowing where you have been, will express the possibilities of where you can go, but showing projections express the desired path that you will go. It’s all how you express that conventional story that allows the many genre to fully understand it without question.

Today, it’s about the whole plan I have, but time needs to be invested in protecting that book of books, and even I need to work on my redundant backups of files. Without backing up your story makes the difference between a story of validity, or mere “hearsay”. After all, if everything gets lost, there is no proof that the story was true, or fiction. To do this, I have two things to get done. The first is to burn a copy onto DVD. That actually is a permanent timeline or milestone, locking the work done before it was changed or improved. The second is to back it onto an external Hard Drive, as a “workable copy”, just in case the original version accidentally gets destroyed, which includes the master computer that holds all these activities.

When it comes to looking at my day as a business day, it is not lot time towards moving forward, rather an investment of securing the past. I won’t make money today, but, I can always have the story of the money I made in the past. Today is an investment to securing the work I will do in the future. The best part of this investment is the time I have done in the past, by making backups a monthly routine, that has allowed me to create the process of these two backup strategies a routine rather than work and time towards how to do it. As the backup of records are in progress, I have time to focus on other matter…such as writing a blog. Even the blog will eventually be a source of income (hopefully), and with it written once, it can be used as a reference, or be included in other resources later. In short, a blog may appear as a diary, but it is more a business plan being designed. The work involved is making it a routine, making it important to be done, and keeping it fresh (current).

When it comes to calling yourself a business, the work you do has to be as important to you as earning a paycheck. To be employed and not work, you typically call it a “lost day” of work. As a business, it is up to you to make that lost day, a work day without pay, but not with something to show for it.. This is the concept of “investing time” towards you, the business. So, since you have no real means of paying yourself, you need to always work on utilizing your time while you can, since you are basically getting through this day on monies earned the weeks before. Of course, you do wish to learn how to implement the work into the activities that make you money, but with no work to be done, use this time to develop your ability to focus, come up with a routine, and if just starting out, explore the steps needed to make it a routine. By doing this, it fills your time, and it also becomes your own measure of “business development”, since whatever routine you learn today, can be applied to be implemented in your real work day in the future. Honestly, never let a day get by with no work to show for it, especially when you were planning on working anyway. This is the concept of investing your time. The trick is making it as important and timely as if you had a real deadline to make it a day worth working…for yourself.

Back to my day. So far, as I thought of how I was going to get an unpaid workday accomplished, I started this blog with a title, then plugged in the external Hard Drive, set up the series of folders to copy, and got it to start copying. Then, back to the blog. The external Hard Drive had no issues arise (errors popping up on the screening), letting me write out the first four paragraphs of this blog, while 19 GB of folders and files became my workable copy. Once done (I had to see it was complete), I setup the DVD Drive to burn off a series of DVDs of the same folders and files. Since each DVD can only hold 4.37 GB of files, this would be a series of DVDs to burn, so that is why I first used the External Hard Drive. Burning a DVD now gives me about ten minutes to blog again. After the first DVD is done, I will need to invest my time in labeling it, and set up the next DVD, before returning to this blog. After checking the DVD driver’s progress, I have time to finish this sentence…

After starting the third DVD, it came time to get as many complete Folders together. It gets complicated to use up as much space on a DVD as possible, and for one folder, it will have to have three DVDs to copy the Files inside. Using a generic Burning Program means I have to choose where the dividing lines of files are copied on each DVD. Marking the DVD’s is now really important. I also have a database started to start recording all these copied folders and files, but that is a separate project for now (I have not mastered a process of doing this in a certain order yet). For now, I can recall these mot recent backups by memory, but as time goes by, these archives need to be recorded, so they can be accounted for, and even reused, later.

I recently wrote a blog that pointed out that backing up on DVDs is a way of regaining disk space, but when it comes to making variations upon variations of a file, backing up to older files also limits confusion (how would you like to add new information on an older version of files, only to need to rewrite or cleverly copy into the most recent version). My true point of DVD back up still remains to be a milestone (timeline) of records created in it’s rawest forms. The point here is once you start dedicating yourself to using the computer and its programs as a business tool, you never want to lose track of your work or get so cluttered that it takes time to make sense on what you wish to work on. In the same sense, you never want to just backup on DVD’s any active files you will constantly be adding or improving upon. For me, monthly backups was the routine, as a milestone, but deleting the most recent files being used would have been just as confusing to find as it is to have everything on the hard drive.

The best practice for me is to use what I have, and anything recent needs to be reviewed, only to get more use out of it later. As I close out this first phase of the project, everything financial remains on the computer, while the other two aspects of this project is on DVD. Now, time is of the assents, to get this closed, and back up the project, then, bring back the next phase to be organized and completed.