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Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog. We’re ending out another quarter, so it’s time for another goals recap post.
If you remember from last time, I set some goals at the beginning of Q4. As a refresher, they looked like this.
Now, my Trello board looks like this.
As a reminder, this post comes a few weeks before the end of the quarter because I still have a yearly recap to also look over, and there might be more progress on these before the quarter officially ends. Let’s go over this quarter in more detail.
Writing – 55/136 Goals Completed – 40%
Q3 was my worst quarter on record since I’ve kept records ever. That being said, going into NaNoWriMo, I was not expecting to get as much work done as I eventually did on my manuscript. I got so much writing done that I actually had to start writing book 2 in mid-November, just to have something to write.
The manuscript that should not be, otherwise known as Work It Out, I’ve talked about on TikTok. Basically, each character has a scene from their point of view, and each scene has a song in their playlist. But when I thought I had the scene list and playlists finished for the outline, it turned out I was still missing either a song or a scene. So I still have some filling in to do there.
Business – 2/3 Goals Completed – 67%
I did intend to upload 3 items as usual to my Etsy shop this quarter, but instead, I took one month “off” and finally did the other thing I’ve been kicking myself to do, which is moving my shop off of Etsy and onto my blog. Now you can find all of my items on the regular site, and if you wanted to know, these are the two new items added to the shop this quarter:
Marketing – 28/28 Goals Completed – 100%*
Again, the quarter isn’t over, but we can pretty well assume I will write the last post of the year looking at closing out the year.
I also have the last two podcasts of the year already staged, and they should be easy recordings, which I plan to get to this week. Because I have to write this post early, no, they aren’t done yet, but I think it’s safe to assume they will get done and on time as I have not yet missed one in almost two years of podcasting.
I’ve also been doing an experiment with my TikTok account which isn’t mentioned as a task list item but is something marketing-related that I’ve been working on all quarter.
Travel, Training, Meetings – 17/22 Goals Completed – 77%
I started taking a class this quarter which, honestly, I hoped I’d get more take-away value from, and which so far has not been that actionable for me. Some small insights have been helpful, but it has not been the class I thought it would, unfortunately.
I did meet with my personal bestie and writing buddy technically more than three times this quarter (I think it was 5 times?) to talk about writing. She read my entire manuscript in one go. If you don’t have a bestie like that in your life, I mean, get you one. I helped her outline her entire first act and then some onto notecards from random scenes that she’s had in her mind. We’ve both been really productive this quarter.
Quarter 4 Overall – 102/189 Goals Completed – 54%
So this quarter wasn’t last quarter. Already, even if I do nothing more but the aforementioned blog and podcast posts, I’ll still have beat last quarter by a landslide.
I hadn’t planned on doing NaNoWriMo, exactly. That was a huge help because it got me unstuck in my manuscript. I was not really working on it seriously before November, and then I finished the manuscript before the month was out and was also forced to figure out the second book and start writing it on the fly too.
Things slowed down in my personal life and I think I had more time overall to catch up with things that were being put off over the busiest summer I’ve ever had. I’m pretty satisfied with this quarter. There are some easy things I may still try to check off the list before the year is out, but even if I don’t, I feel like I did well without burning myself completely out.
That’s got to be a win.
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?
