Previously… having cracked getting up at 5am weekdays to write (tomorrow is my 200th time) I determined to better schedule my week. I've replaced my beautiful iMac wallpaper with a very rough and graphically ugly timetable for the week with times for phone calls, development of new pitches, financials and a couple of other things. Most of the week is left blank for the actual work and this is all a pattern for what the week should be, it's never what it actually is. (Read Part 4 here.)

But now, another week along, I think I can call it: the pattern week works.

The bad thing is that it feels like having a job.

I kept the number of sections on the timetable to just a few and yet it's enough that I clock-watch for the first time in my adult working life. I am conscious that the hour for phone calls is coming up. I am very conscious and rather relieved when that hour is done.

The calls may be the biggest success, though. We all have our tough spots, the things we struggle with in business, and for some reason mine is making cold phone calls. I'm a journalist, I've been a journalist, I'm used to the automatic picking up of a phone to call people. If you don't know something and you know who does, ring, ring, hello.

But cold calls pitching for work, I find that hard and one thing I was determined to do this month was make myself do more calls. I decided I would do thirty in January: it's a big number when 1 is hard, but it felt achievable. And since I could obviously only make work calls during the working week, that meant I had to do more than one per day to make the total. I've gone a touch further and scheduled to make calls only four out of five days. It does give me a break on the fifth day but it also means I absolutely have to make several calls each day in order to hit that thirty. So I have to do several and I have to do them at a certain time.

I don't have to.

This is all self-imposed.

But having imposed it on myself, it now feels real. It feels like I have to. I figured that the need to do several and having a starting time to do it means that I will get going and that as I finish one call I will immediately go to the next without thinking.

It's working.

The aim was 30 calls in January and there are 18 days in which to do it. (That's Monday to Thursday, each week.) That means I have to make 1.67 calls per day.

I've made an average of 3.4 instead.

To date. With a week to go.

I've made 48 calls and considering I found 1 so hard, I am hoping that I've also cracked my phone issues. There are definitely moments when it feels like a game and very many moments when yes, I've hung up from one call and been dialling the next in the same breath.

So that's good and the pattern weeks idea has demonstrably helped me in at least this one area.

But what tickles me is that I've learnt in my game, in my various types of writing, phone calls aren't half as effective as emails. I could already do emails: I'm good at emails!