Word Count
My goal for 2021 was 460K. I reached 430K, so about 30K off. I blame the unplanned for knee surgery for that. I would have hit 440K, but I came down with a cold last week and couldn’t write.
I realized that I’m really gun-shy about planning anything for 2022. So my tentative word count goal for 2022 is 500K. I have set up a plan to revisit my goals at the end of every month and readjust as necessary.
500K is 40K a month, which used to be a slow month for me. We’ll see what I achieve this month, then go from there.
Steps/Knee
Well, the knee surgery skewered my plans for walking 10K per day. (Mind you, there at the end, before the surgery, 10K was a bit much. 5-7K was much more doable.)
I am not setting an automatic goal of 10K per day starting in January. I’m going to build up to it instead, adding 1600 steps per day per month, so that after three months or so, I should be back to 10K.
Breaking that down, it means adding 400 steps per day per week. Right now, I’m averaging about 5500 steps per day. By next Monday, I should be averaging 5900 steps per day. Next week, I’ll try to start averaging 6300 steps per day. And so on.
We’ll see how this goes. Currently, there’s SNOW. We got another 3-4″ last night. Yuck. But it’s above freezing and we have what the weather app calls a “light wintery mix” of rain, sleet, and snow coming down. This amount of snow makes it difficult to walk, but I’m managing anyway. (I might end up having to be a little stubborn about this.)
I continue to do yoga and stretch every morning. My progress has slowed in terms of knee flexibility, but I can still see some. And that’s what’s most important. The top of my knee, along the scar, is finally a LOT less painful. Not quite to the point that I can kneel on it. That will hopefully come in January, so that by summer, I’ll be able to kneel on the ground and work in the garden.
Weight
I’m currently floating above and below my goal weight. As long as my weight stays there, I’m not intending to talk about it much.
Email
I was really consistent at cleaning out my email for the first half of last year. Possibly even until August. Then things got crazy and I fell off the band wagon.
Time to get back on it, though.
I had planned on cleaning out all my email inboxes last week. However, I got sick. I couldn’t do much of anything. So I’m a week behind already on that plan. 😉
What I’ve been finding amazingly effective is this simple statement: go through my email by 3 PM. This gives me a lot of time to get around to my email, in addition to a deadline. If I miss the 3 PM, I still find myself saying, “Gotta do it today.”
I’m not as good about getting through my email on the weekends, and kind of relapsing on Saturday meant I didn’t do much of anything. But Monday through Friday, I’ve been a lot more efficient about it. (Except for last week, being sick.)
Business
I mostly stayed on top of the business end of things. There were a few things that fell down.
However, just getting to the business side of things when I get around to it isn’t really working for me.
So I’ve come up with doing business the last week of every month. I won’t publish anything that week, won’t do any covers, etc. My main focus for that week is business. Which means filing, doing accounting work, pulling all the business reports, etc.
Coming up with this plan reduced my anxiety when it came to staying on top of all the business things. I will probably do a few things during the month as needed, but also having dedicated time for it helps.
Publishing
I’ve published something once a month, every month, for four and a half years now. My inventory is low. Until I finish a few of the novel series that I’ve been working on, I’m considering going to an every other month schedule. We’ll see.
Venues
There are going to be some changes of venues this year, but I’m not ready to talk about those. Stay tuned!