This is my monthly attempt at keeping at it. These posts aren’t crafted, they’re brain dumped, so please excuse the poor writing and comma abuse. The original post is here. I’m kind of making it up as I go here, so I apologize if I jump around a little. But basically the plan is to do weekly and monthly reviews. The weekly reviews I’m keeping to myself, since it’s basically boring accounting and nothing that would be interesting to see. The goals side of the monthly reviews I’ll post here.
Alright, enough preamble, let’s get at it.
Summary of January
January wasn’t too bad, actually. I did a pretty decent job keeping track of my time (still looking for a less-invasive way to do it). There was about a week and a half where I lost motivation to track or I told myself I was too busy. Not an excuse, really. I haven’t done the tallies yet, but I can tell you right now I’m short on every category I wanted to progress in. The thing I’m most disappointed in is my writing. But we’ll get to that below. For a first month, I’m not unhappy with how it went. The very fact that I’m writing this post is actually a little encouraging, since it means I got back on the horse after falling off.
Goal Progress
1. Lose 60 pounds
This is one category I’m actually pretty pumped about. My scale likes to jump around (seriously, I can get it to give me a 10 lb range, depending on where I stand and how I lean), but once I’m awake enough to keep my balance, I can be consistent enough. Given that, any number for progress I put here could really be +/- 2 pounds or so (but it will average out over time).
Monthly Progress: 13 pounds lost
Total Progress: 13 pounds lost
Ratio: 13/60 ~ 21.6% complete
Thoughts: Day to day is stressful, but it’s good to see there’s progress. I’d like to think this means I’ll lose the 60 lbs by May, but I know it doesn’t always work that way. Plateaus, outside factors leading to weight gain like stress, travel, etc. But I’m also pumped that I’ve made this much progress. It’s been a long time since I’ve effectively lost weight, and I’m pretty sure I can keep it going as long as it needs to go. There’s a chance I might even hit the larger goal of losing 100 lbs. It is, at this point, not yet impossible. Wooo!
2, 3, 4. Writing
Since these goals are about finishing things, I technically haven’t made any progress, but let’s not look at it that way right now. Writing was the first thing to lose out when my schedule got hard. It takes me a good 10 – 20 minutes to get “in the zone” when I’m writing, so I have to schedule fairly large blocks to be effective. Also, I hit a wall on the planning side, and that slowed me down a lot. However, I’ve made it past the first wall and I have a plan for the next handful of scenes, though I need to plan out the longer consequences of that scene (it shouldn’t be just color, those are wasteful).
Monthly Progress: 0 words written, 1 scene plotted, LN series main plot arc loosely planned, some world building done
Total Progress: 0 words written. 1 unwritten scene plotted. 1 major arc completed
Thoughts: Not happy about the lack of progress here. I’m too focused on the light novels without sketching out other possible manuscripts and stories. My goals on writing were my most ambitious, so I need to apply myself more here. Depending on lots of factors, this could be my legacy, I should treat it with that kind of respect. More effort is needed here this month.
5. 50 posts published here
Since this is post # 2 / 50, I’m not doing so well on that. 🙁
Monthly Progress: 2
Total Progress: 1
Ratio: 1/50 = 2%
Thoughts: I need to do two posts per week to catch up. I don’t want to get too far behind, especially if I want to reach for that 100 posts in the extended goals.
6. 1000 followers on Twitter
I’ve done nothing to push this number, only posting when I stream.
Monthly Progress: 0
Total Number: 47
Ratio: 47 / 1000 = 4.7%
Thoughts: Not too worried about this one at the moment, though it would be nice to have a little more of an audience. I’d like to earn it though.
7. Taken the JLPT N5
Or more generically: Study Japanese. Did it pretty well on week 1, OK on week 2, none after that. I’ll come up with a way to measure progress and totals later, since this one seems harder to track exactly. Probably something about # of Kanji, and maybe # of vocab words. We’ll see. I’ll need a good handle on those numbers to do that though, and I’ll work on collecting those statistics this month.
8. 300 Twitch Followers
I’ve almost kept to two regular shows. Monday is retro games (specifically Ys at the moment), and Friday night/Saturday morning (US/EU) is VNurday (still working on Aselia the Eternal). I think I had one weekend stream too. One show I lost a follower, but mostly I’ve been getting 1 – 2 followers per show. With a few coming because of ties due to my current job, so that’s nice. Hopefully I’ll get more 😀
Monthly Progress: 7 followers
Total Progress: 95 followers
Ratio: 95 / 300 ~ 31.6% Total, 7/212 ~ 3.3% New
Thoughts: If I keep this rate, I won’t make it in time for the end of the year, but I’m counting some on a snowball effect, and a handful of “good streams.” It seems like every once in a while, I get lucky and get 10x my normal viewership. I’m not a big streamer, and frankly, I’m not trying to become one right now. It’d be great to get a few more regulars, but I like remembering people and talking to them. The disgusting marketing reason I’m doing this is reach. The more personal reason is that it’s just fun to stream. If I can get the shows feeling more like shows (and upload them somewhere, or even host them) I might go the patreon route on this. Enough rambling on this topic, I think.
9. Outside income
The goal here isn’t to live off outside income, but to diversify my income sources so I can more easily justify the time I make doing other things. Hobbies are nice, small side businesses are respectable (and can be fancier, since they can self-fund).
No specific progress though, and I don’t expect any for a couple months yet. I expect this one to be on the back end of the year if I can hit it.
10 & 11. Podcast and Plushies
Haven’t touched these. Thought about both, but no action.
12 – 22. Bonus Goals
Not discussed yet. Most of them are stretch goals for the above goals, and all are related. I’ll address them when they make sense to be addressed.
Final Thoughts and Looking Forward
Some areas have been more successful than others. I don’t feel bad at all about the ones that I haven’t touched. I can’t do everything at once, and if I tried, nothing would get done. I did a better job focusing on the task I was working on this month, but I would still get easily distracted if I wasn’t making progress on whatever I was doing. The practical effects of that included not getting much writing in, and working pretty long hours the last two weeks of January, since I would get distracted and get less done per hour. Need to reign that one in.
Direction and focus this month (and some sub-goals):
- Focus on the task at hand. One task at a time.
- Write, plan, build worlds, blog. Make serious progress.
- Morning Pages – every day, at least Mon – Sat. Try to keep the streak.
- 10 ideas for outside income, even if they can’t be implemented yet or aren’t feasible.
- 5 new podcast/show ideas, even if they’re bad ideas.
- 8 blog posts, 2 of which are technical.
See you next month.
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