Heya, friends! I hope everyone enjoyed Across Worlds with You! (And if you missed it, all nine parts are now available in the freebies section!)
Here we are, mid-February, about a month and a half into the year (which is a little crazy if you think about it).
Last month I talked about why I thought everyone tends to be so productive at the beginning of January as well as my goals for the year, which including adding in side goals in reading, art, and video games and whether or not I thought that was going to be a bad idea.
And now that we’re six weeks in, I’m going to say–I think they were a good idea.
I can’t always concentrate on my big project. I’m not sure anyone is actually capable of 100% focus on their main project at all times. I’m tired from work, or I only have ten minutes before I need to go do something, or my brain is just fried in general. What I found last year was that when I hit these times I tended toward binging YouTube or playing hours of Minesweeper or something along those lines, which was frustrating because I was not doing what I wanted to be doing and also wasn’t enjoying my time doing whatever it was I was doing instead.
So what I’ve found with the addition of the side goals is that instead of defaulting to the dumbest thing possible when I can’t work up motivation, I’m doing slightly more structured things instead.
My laptop borked itself for about four hours a week ago, making it unusable for editing, and I did some sketches while I waited for the updates to install. Yesterday morning I got a little overwhelmed with beta feedback, and instead of coloring on my phone I played one of my chosen Steam games for the month. I had to spend literally all day Saturday in a church gymnasium and I read most of a book. (The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George, which I was reading as part of my library’s challenge for the year, for the “takes place in Paris” category.)
I’m feeling more productive in general, and I probably am! And they don’t seem to be distracting from my main goal–at least not yet–just changing the way I’m spending time I wasn’t going to spend revising anyway.
I do have some side writing goals this month–reading through Deep and Blue and doing final revisions and some marketing things for releasing it as a complete novella–that may interfere with the main revising goal, but that is a potential problem for future!Kit and so I’m not going to worry about it yet.
How are your goals for the year going, friend?