Quote for the New Year:
New Year’s Day. A fresh start. A new chapter in life waiting to be written. New questions to be asked, embraced, and loved. Answers to be discovered and then lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach
Last day of the year….kind of crazy how quickly the past few months time flew by.
Today, I spent the majority of my day planning for 2019. Not making resolutions, mind you, but planning.
Resolutions are to be broken. Goals/plans are to be achieved. Says who, you may ask? Says me…or at least this has been my experience.
So today, I put together a list of my business goals and personal goals for the coming year — things I hope to accomplish in my professional and personal life — and then I scheduled it all on my calendar (faithfully adhering to my “calendar-based productivity system”). So it looks as though 2019 is going to be “the year of writing’ for me as I have many, many books planned, some fiction, some non-fiction, and some courseware (though these are better classified as manuals rather than books — 400-page manuals mind you, but still manuals nonetheless).
And several video courses too. But these will be for techie stuff like Lightroom and Photoshop.
Speaking of books, one of my fiction books will be published in January (fingers crossed). This would be Book 4 in my Ghost Oracle series in which Nick once again gets himself in a whole heap of trouble. Huh…I just realized that I don’t have a title for the book yet. I guess I better get on that.
Book 5 is also nearly half written so you should be seeing this one pop up in the coming months.
Oh — and there is also a new series that I’m working on that will hopefully see the light of day this year (But shhh! It’s a secret!).
Some of the stuff I’m planning for the coming year was stuff that I should have done in 2018. But two surgeries delayed me a tad and pushed me off schedule. A lot. But now I’m back on track and ready to face 2019 with optimism (and no surgeries!).
What are your goals for 2019?
This summer Mike and I went on a 2-1/2 week long motorcycle trip to Canada, the Niagra Falls, and to Lake George, NY and I took a little bit of video along the way — my first vlog, actually. So below is the video of our trip. It’s about 20 minutes long or so. I learned a lot while putting this together so hopefully, the next vacation video will be better!
I’ve kept an electronic to-do list for years now, and every day, like clockwork, I find myself swiping the majority of the tasks in that day’s agenda to reschedule them for the next day. There never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done, and essential tasks habitually end up getting moved from one day to the next and the next and the next.
Then, a while back I watched a video of someone who advocated a “calendar-based” lifestyle in which rather than creating never-ending to-do lists, everything is scheduled on the calendar.
Everything.
The idea here is that the reason we fail to tick off all the items on our to-do list is that we underestimate how long it takes us to perform tasks. We add 25 items to our list when in reality, it’s only physically possible for us to complete 11 of them. Moreover, when every hour is scheduled on a calendar — including breaks, relaxation, and meals — there is less chance of us getting distracted or forgetting to do something.
I did a bit more research into this, and as it turns out, many productivity folks use and advocate a calendar-based productivity system rather than a to-do list based one. The more I read about this, the more it made sense to me, so I decided to give it a try myself in 2019. I spent a good portion of a day creating a workable schedule though I imagine it will go through several iterations until I tweak it enough that it works.
What’s important here is that every single item that I want to accomplish during the day is on my calendar and that every one of those items has a notification set to it so that I’ll be alerted when it’s time to switch gears. To start out with, I set the default notification to 5 minutes for tasks and 30 minutes for appointments.
I’m looking forward to delving into this system and seeing whether it’ll help me to be more productive. Perhaps 2019 will be the year when I’ll retire my not-so-trusty to-do list application.
Stay tuned for further developments.
Back when I was writing up book reviews on this blog, I posted several times a week. But ever since I moved my book reviews over to rogersreads.com, I inadvertently stopped posting over here completely. I guess I didn’t realize how much book reviews made up this blog.
So one of my goals for the new year (always goals, never resolutions), is to post regularly on this blog. Maybe even daily. Now wouldn’t that be something? I remember a couple years back author Austin Kleon stated that as a goal, he was going to publish a blog post every day for an entire year. And he did. As far as I know, he’s still doing it. So I thought, what the hell. I’m going to give it a try too and bring my languishing author blog back to life.
So the goal is to publish one post here every day. It may be a lengthy post, a book-related post, a movie review, a tidbit of interesting news, an inspirational or humorous quote or simply an image but I’m going to post something here every day. Well, that’s the goal anyway. Truth be told, I shouldn’t have too much difficulty accomplishing this given that I’ve maintained a daily journaling habit since 1980.
So this here’s my post for today. See you tomorrow!
