More on 2017

In the New Year, I wrote a list of goals on my main blog (or is it my craft blog, or my hobbies blog, or my blog I don't mind the general public seeing as much? Ahdunno!). I created 9 goals, as 9 is an important number for me. Here they are in short form, to save you from having to click over:

1. Spend more time outside.
2. Share more on the blog.
3. Finish KonMari'ing my house.
4. Plan a regular yoga practice.
5. Continue my rune studies and other spiritual pursuits.
6. Spend more time doing crafts.
7. See if my sewing machine still works; if not, buy a new one.
8. Explore fashion more and take more photos of myself.
9. Play with my dolls more, and make/design things for them.

Even as I was formulating them, I realised they were mostly to do with things I write about on my hobby blog, so I decided to use my Life Square that I created last new year to come up with a more balanced set of goals .... eugh *shivers* goals gwishes (as Havi from The Fluent Self calls them!). I made up a 9x3 grid (because, I dunno, that was just working for me at the time) and slotted the gwishes into it. Then I added in more to fill out the grid:



The 9 gwishes from my hobby blog are highlighted in green. I called it a matrix because that just sounded cool. A few of the gwishes are fairly simple and/or things I'll probably do in the next month, it's true, but I wanted to give myself a couple of easy ones. Self love, baby, self love!

Looking over it again, I also realised that nearly all of the gwishes will further ones on my 101 Things in 1,001 Days list, which is great!

Then I made an attempt to write a list of actions underneath each gwish, but my brain went Ugh!!, and it didn't happen. But I'm back again today, inspired (as I was this time last year) by the organisational prowess of Marietta of Witchy Words, as well as this article I read this morning: Why You Should Be Planning for 2018, Not 2017. Medium has about a billion articles on motivation and suchlike, especially at this time of year, but for some reason that one stuck with me. Well, it has for the last 6 hours anyway.

With both of those influences percolating away in the back of my mind, I determined to have another go at writing a list of actions that will get me closer to my gwishes in 2017. I will use all the lessons I've learned in goal-setting and SMART Thingies and blah blah to craft it. (Can I count it as working on my crafts?)

[fast forward to tomorrow]



I copied out the 9x3=18 gwishes into a new page, and made space for up to 3 actions underneath each one. I greyed out any that I don't want to start working on straight away. I took it easy, working on one gwish at a time, breaking down things into as small actions as possible, trying to make them into Complete Willingness Units (CWU) as Barbara Sher calls them. (Many people have thought of alternatives names for that concept, and I might too one day.) Actually, I'm not too sure I did so well at this part -- most of them can be broken down into smaller tasks, but at least it's a start.

The idea now is to add the matrix to my weekly routine -- the bit where I check my master list to see what I want/need to do for the upcoming week. Theoretically, that should keep things chugging along until I achieve all my goals gwishes! Part of me is tempted to pooh-pooh it all and say I can't/won't do all that. Another part of me is tempted to add more and more until it's completely impossible to achieve. Part of me is thinking, "what if I do other stuff that isn't on the list, then that stuff won't really count!" (I have no idea what purpose it serves to think things like that.) But the article I read says you really have to believe you can do things if you want to achieve them, so I'm really going to try.