Quarterly Update: Reviewing Q1 and Planning Q2

Tags

book marketing, business planning, business taxes, entrepreneur, plan with me, productivity, quarterly goals, quarterly review, tapping into my creativity, writing consistently

Hello, lovelies!

So, I’m trying something new. Well, mostly new. I’ve tried a quarterly review before and found them less than helpful, but I knew I needed to review the last three months in order to make all of that shit I’ve tracked mean something.

If you’d like to see my process more fully, watch me plan here:

 

Here’s my simplified attempt:

-What I overestimated

-What I underestimated

-My vision

-My current pain points

It was easy for me to break these categories down. I’ve always overestimated what I can accomplish, most notably my ability to multitask. This is a cycle I go through again and again. As an undergrad, I learned that multi-tasking isn’t actually a thing. We can only focus on one thing at a time in truth, so having Bob’s Burgers or Bones playing in the background is not just noise. It’s distracting me from getting my shit done.

I also learned that I’ve underestimated my ability to write and write consistently. This year, one of my main goals is to write every day. You know, minus a day or two given life happens. First, it was two-hundred-and-fifty words a day, which was hard for the first month. Come month two, my average increased daily. For March, I doubled it to five-hundred words a day. And guess what, the last two months made that rather easy. Most of the time, I reached six-hundred words or more. And man, did I learn something about practice and doing something every day consistently. Creativity became much easier to tap into with regular use.

Next, I wanted to compare my current vision for my life and business with my vision at the beginning of the year, which was to grow my business, publish more, and improve my environment at home. This is where my word for April came from: realign. The major note within this is to simplify. Creativity always meant big and elaborate projects to me, but the more I’ve tried to accomplish this, the more I fell flat on my face. In recent years, I’ve noticed that the simpler a project, the better it came out because I could focus on the important bits rather than juggling all of these ideas at once. I plan to remember and implement this for the next quarter—and year. Actually, this helped quite a bit with my last project through Transmundane Press, and it meant a successful and fully-funded Kickstarter campaign!

Here’s hoping it brings me continued success.

These categories created my current pain points, which center on money, time, and focus. Honestly, the biggest pain point was taxes. Boy, do I loathe them, but I hope the struggle this year will mean that next year will be easier. Overall, these points generated my next quarter’s goals: research marketing and advertising to start small and expand, limiting distractions, power blocking—which changed my weeks when it came to posting blogs for the press—and keeping a balance sheet as the year goes rather than fumbling at the end of year for my taxes.

Pretty simple, again, my overarching vision for this year and my life.

The list was helpful, but it spurred a letter-like list of notes to myself to reflect on why these things happened and real advice to keep me on track. If you can’t read my handwriting, it pretty much says what I have here with a little stronger language aimed at myself. Aka, do better damn it.

So, here’s my next ninety days’ goals and project plans. I’ve had to include a “leftovers” section due to my procrastination issues, but with the semester ending, and two other projects ending along with it, I should be able to tackle these before the summer.

 

What are your goals this quarter? Did you get everything you wanted done last quarter? Tell me about them in the comments below!