Episode 76: How to plan for 2022

In this week’s episode, JP and Crys talk all about their goals and intentions for 2022 and their different methods of planning for the year. 

Question of the week: What are your goals or intentions for the new year? Share your answer here!

Show Notes

How To Write Funny Characters by Scott Dikkers

Support us on Patreon!

Transcript

JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 76 of the Write Away Podcast. And it is the 31st of December 2021 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: Hey Crys. It’s the last day of the year. How’s your week been?

Crys: Wow. That’s wild. Also where in the world did this week go, let alone this year?

My week’s been a bit of a struggle bus and I don’t know if that’s just post-holiday unfocusness or whatever. But I’ve still come to the desk every day and got work done. And as I was recording the TASM podcast with J yesterday we talked about this a bit, I was like right now I’m just struggling to find what the routine inside of the work hours looks like, because I get to the computer fine, but in that space I’ve lacked focus. But part of our goal this episode is to talk about our 2022 plans, and that forced me to get some clarity. So hopefully next week will be great.

How was your week?

JP: Slightly similar. Just getting over the holiday madness. I ended up taking a day off because I was supposed to be the backup if I needed to go somewhere. And then it snowed that day. So it became a snow day, which I mean, I chose it, but at the same time, it felt nice because it was like, “ooh, a snow day.”

And I did a ton of writing and I realized how, like, when you can take time off from something, how much time you can put into something else, which was fantastic. So that was really nice because I didn’t realize how much I could get done in a day, because I’m very used to having to incorporate this into a bunch of other things that I’m doing. So that was a nice feeling. I would say it wasn’t a terrible week, but it was about the same, a little bit of struggle.

Crys: Yeah, delightful for us.

JP: Yay. End of year.

Crys: So how did you go about planning your 2022?

JP: I did not want goals. I think that was very important for me to just have the ‘what would I want to see in 2022’ as like what I intend to do. And then when we did our tarot episode yesterday and we talked about what our card of the year was, that actually played influence to at least one of the plans for 2022, just to be more mindful of myself. So that’s how I approached it was just, what do I want to see out of the year? And I didn’t write down all of the steps that it would take to get to them, but it was more of a ‘what felt natural for next year to be ‘, if that makes sense.

How did you approach it?

Crys: So I needed to clarify what I had on deck. So I did a brain dump, first of all. And then I knew that I wanted to approach this year with quarterly planning, which I’ve not attempted before.

I looked at my list of things that were important for me to close out in this next year and planned what am I going to do for the first three months. What are my priorities going to be? And then as I was looking at the other quarters, I was like, oh there are things that it makes sense, like where they fall, knowing what it’s important for me to close out this year. And I didn’t think I was going to be able to set up plans for each quarter, but I ended up doing that and I feel a lot of clarity. And I am going to use the word goals because I haven’t planned with goals for a while because I have this relationship with most goals where maybe I’m just not good at setting realistic expectations or realistic steps along the way or keeping to realistic steps along the way. And so I’ll get to the end and then I’ll kill myself getting it done, like to a deadline, and that’s not healthy.

But how I’ve set this year up is for each quarter, except for the first one, I have four, but each quarter I have three things that I want to complete by the end of the quarter. And some of them are parts of projects and not whole projects. And keeping it to that over three months and then setting like a task item for each week makes it feel really manageable. Now I’ll see how that actually plays out over the first quarter.

And one of the other key things I did is as I was making my list, is for each quarter I put big things that I know will be disruptors to my schedule. So like times I know when Smalls isn’t going to have school, holidays that are really big, stuff like that, so that I could keep in mind and be like, hey, like that particular quarter probably needs to have lighter goals.

JP: Technically, mine are goals. I’m just a curmudgeon for the word.

Crys: That’s fair. And the thing is when I’ve approached schools in the past, it’s been like, how much productivity can I eke out of me? And the way I’m approaching it now is, how can I gain focus so I’m not working on the wrong things, and that I’m keeping quite a bit of time clear for me because I know what I’m supposed to be working on?

JP: That’s a way better way of approaching it. I like that. That’s basically what I did, but I like thinking that way.

Crys: Yeah. And having that mindset makes me far less weird and militant about like when I get to the end of a quarter or whatever, being like, oh my gosh, I need to do these things. Because it’s not like I’ve failed if I haven’t done this, my goal is to focus on the right things. If I focused on the right things, even if I don’t get to like the point of success that I’ve marked as here’s where I want to be. Then you know, it’s something I can just be like, okay, like here’s how that goal was not realistic, and here’s how I adjust the next quarter.

JP: It makes sense. I like it. Well-planned.

Crys: Seeing as I had zero knowledge of what was going to go on this list at 6:00 PM last night, I feel pretty good about it.

All right. Do you want to go over what’s on your list?

JP: Sure. I am scared to present. I’m just kidding. So I have four buckets, I guess, that I’ve put my goals into. They are writing services, health, and art. And so under writing, I have the intention to publish five books. Right now, that’s looking like two non-fiction books and three fiction books. Under the three fictions, at least two would be the ones that Abe and I are working on. Then I have one that I want to like draft and publish throughout the whole year.

The non-fiction one, I’m already working on one and then I have a draft of another one I believe that I can grab a hold of. So it’s not like I’m drafting from zero this year, it’s more or less like I’m trying to get things off of my plate.

So that’s one of the goals under writing, and then the next one is the NRDS. Basically continuing with that, but we’re also going to be publishing parts of it, as specified and very clear as to what those are. And then by the end of the year, I believe we could publish the whole thing, which is looking to be like 140,000 words.

Do you want to do a goal or two?

Crys: Yeah. I’ll go over my list and then what I’ve picked for my Q1. But I’ve already realized that there’s, now that I slept on it, that there’s a couple of goals that I was like, I want these done. And then I didn’t actually put them in the year and I don’t know if they’ll fit. So then I may have to curtail the yearly goal, which is great. There’s some class stuff that I want to develop for TASM.

And I have on here that I wanted to finish five romance books, that may still be possible. My co-writer and I are jumping in this week and finishing, starting and finishing one, we planned it the other day. And so our goal is to knock out the series that we kinda left hanging, and those take us, as long as no big bumps come up, particularly personal bumps, because there’s a lot of craziness going on in her personal life, those take us two weeks to write then another week for production issue things. And then we launch. So it’s like a three-week cycle. And then on that fourth week of the month, we plan the next one and then we get to writing the other one.

So for Q3, we may be writing one book a month. And then we have a fourth book, and then I have one that’s half finished. Yeah, I’m just like, okay, it’s feasible, but it’s not, I didn’t put it in my calendar correctly. So I’ve got to sit with that for a minute.

I have two non-fiction books that I would like to write. One is a project with somebody else. And one will be just my own.

I’d like to write and illustrate a kid’s book. So this is more of a fun, artistic goal for me, especially as my kids getting to an age where he can reason and so he can understand a little bit more about what kind of stories he really likes. Because I’ve really liked the idea of writing a kid’s book, but kids, especially young kids, are like no bullshit. Like you cannot get anything past them. And that’s just terrifying. So I have felt very lost about how to write kids’ books. But now that he’s reasoning, I can see like what things I want him to learn, what things interest him. I feel like I’m getting to a place where I can actually combine that. So that’s a goal.

This is a more of an admin-y goal, but this will be really nice, is that a bunch of my books don’t have paperbacks, hardbacks, large prints, and so I want to get all of that put together. I have on here get like four editing or coaching gigs throughout the year, because I want that to be a part of my life because it gives me so much energy. But I also don’t want it to be my entire life.

And that one is not actually on my quarterly goals. And so I’m not really sure how I feel about that, but I’m leaving it there so as I adjust throughout the year, I can refer back to that and just see, is this something I need to put on a quarterly?

And then for my first quarter I’m focusing on four things. It’s the only month that I’m doing that. So there’s planning one of the courses that I’d like to do, and then I have finishing romance as a project. And so that’s the three books that I believe that we’ll write this quarter.

My fantasy serial, my success marker is like that I write one episode over the three months, which is 20 K. And then I broke that out into writing three scenes a week, which seems super reasonable to me. And then the co-written nonfiction book, I’ve put write one scene a week. And so I’ve broken it down into 12 weeks for each quarter, which leaves me a week buffer. So if I get to that week and I’m like, okay, like there’s things I need to catch up on. I can, or I can just say no, that week is just my off week for the quarter. Like I’m not going to work that week.

JP: So well-planned.

Crys: We’ll see how it works out in reality.

JP: It’s true, but it’s very well-planned and I like that you have buffer room for a lot of things. I like it.

Crys: So fingers crossed. And now I think that we’ve talked about doing like quarterly catch ups and how we’re doing with this. Do we want to build those into our tarot episodes or do we want to include those on the main podcast?

JP: I think having like a quarterly update on the main podcast would be good.

Crys: Yeah. I like that. Excellent. You’ve just heard us talk this out, so you can look forward to seeing if this is working for me and how JP’s buckets are going.

JP: Yeah. Do you want to hear my other three buckets?

Crys: Oh yes.

JP: Under services, because I had writing services, health, and art. Under services, I want to build author services. One being, getting at least six new clients. I think I just, I want to find ways to get me more into the author verse, if that makes sense, and less into the corporate verse. So I have get at least six new authors. I also want to retain at least one author. So those listening that have been in the services, I am still looking at you. More or less, that’s just a focus on me, I don’t want to make this a thing where I’m just like constantly grabbing people, but I want it to be a thing that people find extreme value in to come back to. So it’s a reminder to myself that yes, I want new clients, but I also want to be able to retain the old ones.

And then under health, dedicating time each week to moderate exercise. This is going to be like three, four times a week. I really want to get to a place where I was a couple of years ago where I had a personal trainer I’d go to at least once a week. And then because I would feel guilt, as this is apparently how I exercise, because I felt guilt I would do exactly what they said. So I just want to get in that mindset. And doing that at home is going to be the hurdle.

And then my last one is art. Under art, I have create six pieces of art and publish and sell them somewhere. So that could be like, put it on Red Bubble or whatever. But really the health and art things were from the tarot pull. They were pieces that I was like, these are things that I not willing to give up and they’re things that I’m not focusing on.

And the pull, which was a very like inwardly focused thing, just made me think, these are the things that I want, I always put it in the back of my head, and if I have these four buckets, what I do under each of those, and that’s where I came up with those.

Crys: At the moment, I’m just really amused that you were trying to do this whole back and forth like, oh, share a few goals and then share a few goals. And I’m like, here’s my list. And the communication this morning has been stellar. My processing skills have been stellar.

JP: It’s all good. It is. For reference,, we record this at 5 30 in the morning and sometimes both of us have just woken up.

Crys: Oh yeah. As I did my plan last night, I really felt the lack of having the personal goals as part of the plan, but I’m going back and forth on whether I want to put like that bucket in there. Because while I’m really enjoying like how this looks, I’m worried that if I put the personal goals in there, then it will tip it over into trying to plan too much. And I was looking at Sarah Cannon’s HB 90 kind of set up, because I know a lot of authors love her planner and her approach and her class that she has on that.

She chooses one writing goal, one heart breathings, which is her like teaching and non-fiction side of the business, and then one personal goal. And I was like, I really like that overall, like that you have three goals and one of them is a personal goal. But this year, after last year being very personal focused, I want this coming year to be a bit of a recovery on the business side without going too far. And so I stuck to just business goals for right now.

And my personal goals are honestly, there’s only like three things. And that is like, I’ve got lots of lovely little hobbies, like I’m learning the ukulele and gardening all these other things, but my goals are more just , get started taking dance classes, go check out the bouldering gym that’s near me and see if that’s something I can build into my life, and improve my Spanish. Like those are my three personal goals. And so start Spanish classes basically. And those are fairly manageable and if I put together a Kanban board I’ll probably put tasks up there for them. I’m just not putting the big goals on my like, this is what a success marker feels like for this time period.

JP: That makes sense. Yeah. I got the Panda Planner, which I had the Rocket Book version of and then I stopped using it. And I’m 60% sure I stopped using it because it didn’t have the history readily available. I could look in the app and to have to pull it up and whatever, but there was something about looking at the past that I was like, I don’t like this.

Also, it’s very organized. I don’t know how I feel about that. But yeah, there’s just something to having a planner this year that has made me want to do these more, because I think last year I was very not interested in doing goals because I was like, I don’t want to. But yeah, that’s where I’m coming from is I think that even including these like personal goals in my like overall plan, I want it to be more of “me-focused” I guess. Being like it’s my personal progress, so I want it to be like all of the aspects and I’m not ready for a full business goal thing yet.

Crys: This is one of the first years that I actually haven’t used a planner. And quarterly goals before had always seemed so very intimidating. I was like, how do people know how to split a year up? And I was really surprised at how easy it was for me in this particular set up. So I hope the process might help somebody else who would like to track quarterly goals.

JP: Yeah. Do it, tell us what your goals are if you want. Or don’t.

Crys: Or your intentions, or your word, however it is that you approach the new year. Please do share it with us.

JP: Agreed.

Crys: Next week, Wednesday the 12th, 2022, we will be recording our book club on How to Write Funny Characters. So if you would like to join us, you can check out our Patreon, the link will be in the show notes, and join us for the live chat about it. We’re going to have special guest, hopefully. I’m really excited about this book. As usual, I have not yet started it, but I’ve got almost two weeks. So we’re grand. We’re solid.

Thank you so much for joining us this year. We hope that you stick around for another year of chaos and witchy, writerly fun.

JP: Absolutely. See you later.