I have to admit I love my iPhone. I can lay in my bed in the middle of the night snuggled up to my baby boy who just crawled in with me after escaping his room, and write this entry on notepad app of my iPhone typing with only one finger as I usually do (I am fast too!)
So since I fight every night with insomnia and since it always wins I might as well entertain myself by writing this post on my iPhone and then just hit email button and tomorrow when I get on my laptop I can publish this post. I can publish it right now off my iPhone with WordPress app but I like to make posts pretty by adding pictures to them, something I have not yet figured out how to do on my iPhone.
Now, what was it I was going to write about? I think I wanted to say that I need more hours in a day to get things done. Who came up with an idea that day should have 24 hours and 8 of them should be spend sleeping? Whoever it was did not live on North or South Pole I tell you that much! OK, OK, I did not either and even if hours in a day would be longer people like me would find more time to procrastinate. Because that is what I am doing! Look how long it took me to get to the main point of this entry. I could claim I followed Tina’s another great advice of writing here as if I am talking to myself, or I could go on wondering how many sleepless hours in a day I would spend alone if there would be more hours in that day for some miracle. But the truth is I am a procrastinator who possibly likes an excuse. So with more hours in a day I would only procrastinate more when it comes to good night sleep, doing chores, or, aha finally to the main point, working on eBay!
I love selling on eBay! I love excitement of a sale, sense of accomplishment of putting up listings, ring of a ‘door bell’ on Sellebrity as visitors come check out my goodies. I hate the process of listing. No, not really the process. Working up to it. Getting my lazy (oh oh another admission) behind in gear. Once I am in a throes of taking pictures (always in lots of similar items – clothes with clothes, toys with toys, books with books) I am fine. I enjoy myself and part of me thrives on repetitiveness. Same with editing pictures after I took all of them. Same with writing descriptions using my templates changing only brands and measurements. The only tough part is getting started, pulling out backgrounds for pictures from high inaccessible places where it’s equally impossible for me and my children with exploring hands of theirs to reach, separating the items to sell into even much smaller piles by color, type, etc etc. I much rather lurk silently on ebug group, chat with my Facebook friends, or even entertain myself on bonanza forums full of games and fun. I convince myself that I am getting in the mood to work on my listings. Something I learned from my husband. He needs to get in the mood to be creative and write his books, so I need to get in the mood to get creative and take pictures, write descriptions, and finally list. I can kid you guys with it but honest term for it at least from where I sit is Procrastination. And you see, I take so long to “get in the mood” that by the time I am ready to take a picture of a second item in my pile (hey!! At least I finished with the first!), my kids come back from park and I hurriedly have to stuff all the equipment I pulled out back where none of us can reach it. I hear my kids coming from block away because they are so loud but they can hear me too banging things around, scrambling to get on that chair so I can stuff everything as high as possible making sure nothing hangs down from top closet shelves because they will test how high they can jump to pull that hanging corner and have everything come crushing down on their heads with an excuse ‘but mom, we just wanted to make sure you are not hiding any toys!’ So between getting started and finishing on a good day I get only couple items photographed. Writing descriptions becomes night time job but that’s OK, especially if I already got in the mood earlier. After kids are asleep and not around to use their imagination to make new unusual costumes to parade in, I can safely pull back out my laptop, clothes that I just finished photographing, and my scale and begin to write descriptions. After all descriptions are written in Word document and saved before my husband’s cat can walk on keys and destroy all the work I had just done I go to my eBay and quickly and sleepily (only I can’t sleep) add new listings.
Occasionally when I wake up late in the morning and during my routine check on sales, watchers, etc. I notice a mistake in price on one of the items that was listed few hours prior in my half asleep state – instead of say price of $24.99 I have a sweater listed for whooping price of $249.90. Sleep deprivation would do that to you, I promise. Thankfully all I have to do is revise the listing with a couple clicks and bring it down to a reasonable $24.99 without even a penalty of extra fees. I am so glad I never made a mistake in the opposite direction. Listing a $30 item for $3.00 especially with free shipping would not make me happy! Why? Because while wrong priced $249 sweater will most likely not sell, if I mistakenly list $30 item for $3 with free shipping I will most definitely wake up to a sale, happy buyer and a burning hole in my pocket that I would have to write it off as tuition to eBay as fellow sellers on ebug forum refer to their own costly mistakes. When a seller made a mistake we should not make our buyers pay for it no matter how human it was.
So reading about my process of getting into the mood, being able to get only a few listings going on a good day (I will keep my bad days to myself… Hey we all have them, OK?), you might be wondering how on earth did I manage to get to my whooping 269 items in my store? If anyone good in math they will see that at my pace it would take me 135 days. Even I am surprised by that math. Does not seem bad at all. Especially if we assume I have had only good days all 135 of them in a row. And be reminded that I actually do sell things, not as much as I would like to, but still a fair amount.
Except it actually is bad.
I know of fellow sellers, with kids, with families, with same amount of hours during the day (except if they live on North Pole, but even then if we take in consideration day hours per year it would be the same). And those sellers manage to do this process too and list 100s of items weekly. If they can do it so can I.
Next time I decide to get into the mood I should just jump into it with both feet and get stuff listed. I have plenty of items but unlisted they won’t sell. Anyone can figure that out.
But now I should probably stop talking to myself on here and beat this insomnia just for tonight so I can start refreshed in the morning and declare round one victory against Procrastination tomorrow!
Ramblings of an Ebay Addict 