Year In Review

With the advent of the start of school this year, I realized my “New Year” actually starts in August and not January.  That is the natural flow of my year.  The frenzy of buying new school supplies has always been more meaningful and fun than New Year’s Eve parties to me.  Give me a new box of 64 crayons over a glass of champagne any day!  As I prepared to start school again after my summer off, I realized “this” is when my year starts – with the start of the school year, not the lull after the holiday season.  So with the inspiration of Lisa Sonora Beam and her 2010 Creativity Plan, I decided to sit down and do my own goals for 2011-2012.  I also threw in some guidelines and inspiration from The Art of Nonconformity and Chris Gillebeau’s  yearly review plan.  But before I started on the plan itself, I had to create my binder to keep my goals and progress in.

 

 

First off, I took some Japanese prints I got on sale at Borders for next to nothing.  I didn’t want to frame them (too boring) and they had been just laying around waiting for me to find something to do with them.  So I used them for some of my dividers.  I added some of the postcards I received, adhered with my new paper tape.  Most of the postcards I received from a friend when he goes to Thailand.  The other dividers I covered with 2-3 layers of acrylic paint.  All the dividers I made from watercolor paper because I wanted them larger than regular dividers.  Right now all the dividers are in a photo album binder I am recycling from the decluttering of albums I did a couple of weeks ago.  I plan to add some collage work to the binder itself shortly.

 

 

The areas I am concentrating on for this year are writing, school, art/web/journaling, finances, spirituality, exercise/health, home/style, and travel.  I have set goals within each category for the coming year and will review them on a regular basis.  There is a big part of the Virgo in me which loves organizing and plans.  It’s the artistic side of Virgo in me which has issues with the follow-through.  Hopefully, will help.   There is also a section for Ideas and Notes which I added to the back of the binder for future use.  It was very interesting to sit down and decide what it was that I really wanted to concentrate on and how those “things” could be broken down into steps or goals which were much more realistic than normal ‘resolutions’.  So my word of the year, RENEW, can very well be applied to my plans now.

 

 

The basics for both Lisa Sonora Beam’s plan and for Chris Gillebeau’s plan is setting a measurable goal and then breaking it down into smaller steps.  So under writing, for example, I have three major goals – Attend a writing workshop, enter a writing contest, and completing a rough draft of Dragon Earth.

 

 

As you can see, I have a lot of notes, partial outlines, ‘stuff’ for my Dragon Earth trilogy.  Now it is time to get it in gear.  So under completing a rough draft of the books, my first step is to take everything I have on paper and put in onto the computer.  As I do that I will have my notepad open for ideas and thoughts as they come about so that I can jot them down rather than forgetting them or going off on a tangent.  One of the programs I am using more and more is OneNote from Microsoft.  It is really fun and interesting to have a ‘notebook’ on my computer which actually feels like a real paper notebook in many ways.  I have several different notebooks set up for different topics.

But this is my plan.  I am on day three of my new year and how am I doing?  Well, Savvy came home on the first from Arizona and unfortunately, as she travels standby I had to bring her into an airport 3 hours away at the last minute.  There went day one and two…..Day 1 waiting to get her here, Day 2 hung over no sleep and still having to go to work.  Day 3 is better.  I traded my Wednesday off to work for someone on Saturday (while Savvy is off with friends and Texter is at Inkfest) and we did a little errand running.  So now, she is off with friends and I am settling in for some ‘work’ time.