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Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog.
It’s a new quarter, which means it’s time to set some new goals, so let’s jump straight in.
Here we are back at the Kanban-style Trello Board. If you’ve been here a while, you’ll already be familiar with this, but for those that aren’t, I use Trello as a digital sort of Kanban board. I still have categories for my tasks, but I don’t use the “to do, doing, done” modifiers. They all just stay on their lists and I modify the cards within them with checklist tasks that are small and actionable. In other words, either I complete them or I don’t.
I’ve already talked about my yearly goals in another post, so let’s jump right in and you’ll see how my quarterly goals match up with the goals I set at the beginning of the year.
Writing – 104 Goals
So this year I am working on my children’s science fiction trilogy of books, and in my yearly goals post I talked about having drafts of books 1 and 2, but how I wasn’t sure if I was going to finish the draft on book 3, which I’d barely started, or if I was going to start at square one and rewrite them all from book 1. I have been going through and rereading the series and decided to start again at book 1. To that end, I have 104 tasks to complete at the moment to take book 1 from where it is to a lot closer to completion.
Business – 3 Goals
I have an Etsy Shop called Hello Lovelies and I definitely don’t talk enough about it! I sell writing-related printables like cute notecards, word count stickers, and affirmations. I want to add one new item per month to the shop the whole year, both to increase the shop’s stock, and to keep me talking about it in my blog posts all year long. It will also help to keep it more top of my mind instead of something that’s just a fun past time that I do.
Marketing – 26 Goals
My usual blog and podcasting schedule has been 1 of each per week, and though I don’t have a set day that I post, you can usually count on it being posted, come hell or high water, by the end of Sunday night. Since I do not employ anyone to write or market for me, these posts come straight from me every week.
I have always wanted to increase the posts to at least twice per week, but right now the aim is to be able to get enough runway that I am not posting the blog or podcast in the same day that it was drafted or recorded, as is currently the case. That way I can say to you that you’ll always have a blog post on Friday, and it won’t be beholden to me still needing to write that blog post for that content to be made available to you.
Travel, Training, Meetings – 3 Goals
My local writing group meets once a month. My actual paying job doesn’t often allow me to go to the meetings, but I still make goals to try to get over there as often as I can.
Quarter 4 Overall – 136 Goals
This is going to be a writing-heavy quarter, if everything goes the way I want it to. I am going to be focusing heavily on reacquainting myself with the children’s science fiction books since I haven’t worked on them in a long time, and getting the first novel rewritten to be a much stronger version of the book I meant to tell in that first draft.
I don’t expect it will be publish-worthy by the end of the first quarter, but I do expect it will be a much better draft because I have gotten much better as a writer since I wrote this thing several years ago.
Discussion Questions
- How often do you set goals and how often do you check in with them?
- How was your quarter?
- How many goals did you set and how many of them were you able to accomplish?
