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 Q1. As a refresher, they looked like this.
Now, my Trello board looks like this.
Let’s go over it in more detail.
Writing – 25/55 Goals Completed – 45%
Last year, I wrote a book and a half worth of second drafts in the Multiverse and Me trilogy. I intend to write another book and a half this year. To start this quarter, I knew that the second draft got extremely dicey at the end of November’s NaNoWriMo. I needed to fix what I had bashed together and I also need to redo some of what I already knew was bad with the start of the second draft of the first book. My goals therefore, were to get what I already had written back into workable shape in order to continue writing the draft of the second book, which I wanted to pick back up with writing in March.
And I have nearly accomplished this, just not in the way that I was planning to at the beginning of the year, so let me explain. I thought I was going to edit book 1, reread the half of book 2 that I’d written and just pick back up and start writing it. What has ended up happening is, I finally know how all three books fit together and how they end, so I ended up outlining for a third draft of books 1 and 2, and have most of the outline finished for book 3 (I have 4 more chapters to outline as of this moment, but I already have them sketched out).
As a side project, I did still have a few scenes and some songs in a playlist to figure out for my romance novel, Work it Out. My brain has officially wiped itself off this project so this has gotten more difficult, but I did want to actually have these few items finished before I drop the outline-that-should-not-be into the abyss.
Business – 4/6 Goals Completed – 67%
I have a shop called Hello Lovelies where I create high quality, (mostly) writing-related downloads and printables for you to use in your writing practice. I try to add one new thing per month to my shop to increase the amount of shop items available, but also because I’m constantly trying to make useful things for myself and my own writing practice, and I want to share them with all of you.
This serves two purposes. One is that I continue to build my online shop more intentionally than I have been since I started it. The other is that it forces me to get comfortable with talking about my shop and products here on the blog.
On that topic, if you have writing-related downloadable items like infographics, spreadsheets, or something of that nature that you have ideas for and think others might be willing to pay a small amount to have already designed for them, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what they are so that I can look into creating them for you in the future! Definitely tell me in the comments section of this post, because this quarter I only came up with one thing on my own.
I also have a Patreon where you can find exclusive, behind-the-scenes content. If you like my blog, podcast, or any of the content I produce, and want to help cover the costs of producing and maintaining the content, consider donating whatever amount seems right once a month over on Patreon. You will get my entire backlog of content immediately available. As for the goal, I was able to post all 3 months this time around, and, spoiler alert, 3 more months worth of posts are already scheduled, so please consider becoming a Patron and getting those exclusives for yourself!
Marketing – 26/26 Goals Completed – 100%
As is usual, I intended to keep up with both my blog and my podcast by posting at a rate of one blog or episode per week. I still have the last podcast to post, but I already have it set up and ready to record, so I’ll have that done before the quarter is out and we can call this one 100%.
Travel, Training, Meetings – 2/3 Goals Completed – 67%
I tried to set up one writing-related meeting per month with my bestie. I do also have a discord for writers, if that’s a thing you’re interested in joining. The link’s waiting for you below!
Join the Discord for Authors Like You!
Quarter 4 Overall – 57/90 Goals Completed – 63%
I am actually surprised that of the 90 goals I started with this quarter, I didn’t add about 20 more goals in there, as I normally do. I am definitely getting tired of using Trello for my goals. There is nothing wrong with Trello, and I have been using it a long time. I simply am not using it for anything other than my goals checklists, so I have been looking for something more all-in-one.
I adore TickTick for the ease of setting up recurring tasks and for tagging tasks. The now offer a pomodoro timer, which is a bit basic and gets in the way, but workable, and you can assign it to the task you are working on, which I absolutely love.
I am trying out Notion and am liking parts of it and disliking others. I know myself and know that if I can’t find some balance between “how much automation is too much and makes me feel overwhelmed” and “there’s no automation, it’s all manual input” I won’t use the app. I’m hoping that Notion can be that balance, that all-in-one place, because I promise you, I’ve tried Airtable, Evernote, and many, many other popular apps looking for the right thing. I’ve even used Notion in the past, however, found that the learning curve is very steep and I gave it up probably too quickly.
However, I think I will be trying to use Notion next quarter instead of Trello. If I can figure Scrivener out, I think I can do almost anything else, so I hope you stick around to see what my new Notion task list looks like for Q2.
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?
