Are you willing to shift gears in your business? What about in your writing? It’s a fine line to walk. Every now and then, it’s necessary to re-evaluate your strategy. However, it can be tricky. At some point, you have to ask yourself if you’re throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Confession: this blog post was prompted by a recent decision to shift gears on my part. I decided that I’ve lost the original focus of this blog. Okay; maybe I didn’t lose the focus entirely, but I certainly compromised it when I decided to constrain the scope to writing. When I started writing this blog in late 2007, my intent was simple. I basically just needed to rant and vent about my frustrations with the extravert-dominated sales world and its continual resistance to change. There came  a point, though, when I realized that I needed to grow past this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to return to the core fundamental purpose of this blog. Instead of getting up on my soapbox about how to become better at writing (I’ll continue to do that at EzineArticles), I’m going to be sharing about my experiences as an Introverted Entrepreneur. I hope this doesn’t bother you.

I’ve noticed that writing projects are naturally prone to scope creep, much more so than other types of projects, for a number of reasons. Writers are too creative, thinking up too many new ideas at a time; that’s the biggest factor leading to scope creep. But also, we’ve got plenty of stories, and we love standing up on our soapboxes. It seems inevitable, during any writing project, that we’ll be confronted with the tough decision of what to include and what not to include. Blogs are even worse, because they’re written day by day with no pre-defined structure.

I’ve decided that it’s time to contain the scope creep of my own blog, right here. I’ve tried a lot of different things, and I see that this is getting me nowhere. I also notice that the overwhelming mountain of possible topics to blog about leaves me disempowered, and less motivated to blog about anything at all. So, it’s time to put in some focus. From now on, this blog will be focused solely on my core business: writing and editing.

Something else I’ve noticed, when it comes to putting the lid on the scope creep beast, is that two heads are better than one. I’ve found that during client projects, I need to reel the client back in from time to time (or, sometimes, they need to do it for me). Left to my own devices, I’ll drift off into nowhere land.That’s why I’ve decided to make it a priority to make this more interactive.

I would appreciate if anyone would comment on issues you’ve faced with project scope creep, particularly related to writing projects, and what you’ve done to address it.