I’ve been keeping up with my goals for the year! It might sound like a lie, or the beginning of a self help article about the new years (that inevitably tries to sell a course to you), but I really have! Well… sort of. Let me explain.

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I made a post about my goals for the year. It comes with a video of me talking about it, if you’d prefer to listen to it then read it. 

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A month ago, I wrote a post about my goals for 2022, and how I’m planning to keep up with them. It was a list of some odd 440 different task that I wanted to complete by the end of the year. Some of them are going well enough, some less so. What matters is the effort and the pursuit.

I’m going to break it down by category of goal, and how much of it I have actually done. This is a practice of transparency and habit building. Not of showing how cool I am to the internet.

72 Blogposts:

11/72
According to my calendar, I should be on blog post 20. In my defense though, I have outlines done for nearly 30 of these posts, so all I really need to do for these posts is to sit and get down to business.

50 new recipes:

5/50

I should be at recipe 11. This isn’t a quarter of the recipes, but I’ve saved some bigger cooking and baking weeks for later in the year to make up for it. I’m thinking about learning how to make dressings and sauces from scratch, to help me catch up.

150 graphics:

24 out of 150

I should be at graphic 34. This is again an example of me saving heavier writing weeks for later in the year. I also find that I can batch together a whole group of graphics fairly easily.

7 EPs:

1 done… not published yet.

It should be published, but I’m actually really proud of the progress I’ve made on it. A lot of these EPs have been saved for release around the end of the year, so that I can work with other musicians more easily. It leaves more time for planning.

25 books read:

3 finished….

I should have finished 5 by now, but starting a real reading habit has been trickier for me then I thought it would be. Reading online has been pretty easy in the past, but using full books as a metric of tracking how much I read has been a little devastating for me. As someone who thinks of them self as an adamant reader, seeing a low number has been humbling. Maybe I can address this through using a mixed approach to it. Try audio books here, kindle there, a book with help from summaries there. Just keeping things going.

3 zines made:

1 made.

That’s right on track! I need to do some more prints, since friends of mine want to buy some copies off of me. I’m really stoked about this. The frog zine I made has been a success in all the ways I care about. I have the next one in the works. I suspect it will be a really cool collaborative collection with a group of Philadelphia artists.

100 days exercised:

I’ve been doing small exercises everyday, and eating way better. Lost something like 25 pounds in the past 2 months. I’m hyped about this. I’ll start properly tracking today.

30 job applications filled out:

good lord…. I haven’t finished any yet. This is something that I REALLY have difficulty with. So I’m reading about it whenever I can find a moment to.

Take away:

Despite being pretty consistently behind on my goals for the year, I expected this in the first 6 months of the year. This is the resistance of starting new habits. For each time I put time into making these post, images, recipes, applications and art pieces; I’ve chosen it over a bad habit that I a younger me was choosing. It’s also lead to me taking much better care of myself, because I see my body and mind as this crucial tool to my work. So I eat vegetables now. I go for walks. I sleep a reasonable amount. It’s all in the name of keeping this body operational, and as foolish as some of these activities might seem, that motive is something that no one can mess with.

Everyday I’m feeling like a better version of myself, and I’m enjoying that self esteem boost. I think I’ll feel even better when I can leverage my writing from here in a job setting.