A change in the Calendar of Goal Tracking letter lineup.

Okay, I guess it’s nearly 21 months that I’ve been working on my ‘calendar of goal tracking’ productivity trick. 🙂 Over that time, I’ve added a few new letters, and one multiple-letter code, to record new activities that I’ve been time-slicing, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever completely redefined a letter, until now.

Ever since the ‘Team Ambitious’ critique program started up, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on critiques for my Odyssey friends, and learning a lot from them. However, I think I’ve noticed that I’ve been spending less time and effort on drafting and revising my own pieces because of this, and that really does need to change. One of the places to get that change started, I think, is on the calendar. Somewhere along the way, I told myself that working on somebody’s critique was enough to get me an ‘E’ for the day. That stops as of yesterday. E is only for editing my own stuff, just like W is only for doing my own writing, and so on.

But I wanted to keep tracking the Team Ambitious critiquing stuff, and I fussed over what letter to use. T is already in use for the Thinking Sideways course, and A is for my Art exercises, so I couldn’t use either of them, and trying to use them both together could be really confusing. C is for Cleaning, and so on.

But I’ve made a decision. O was originally for Outlining new story ideas, but I’ve never really used that much, (even though I have some outlining to do soon on the Steampunk Roswell/Area 51 idea!) As of yesterday, O stands for Odyssey stuff instead.

And hopefully that’ll mean a few more Ws on the calendar, and some E’s that actually mean my stories are closer to getting submitted!

Calendar goal tracking update!

So, I’m not sure how many of them you can make out, but I’ve written in one hundred and twenty-five letters onto my calendar for the first 21 days of the year. That’s nearly 6 goals achieved per day. Whoo-hoo for me, I think that’s pretty darn good work.

I’ve also added one letter to the ones that I was originally tracking. Since practicing for my next driving test is something that I want to make time for, I’m giving myself a D for every day that I go driving, and I’ve written that in retro-actively for every day that I’m completely certain that I had a driving session. (Including the day of the road test.)

The calendar proudly proves that I am over 20 days for my writing and reading chains, (well over, actually, since I’m continuing chains from 2011,) and I just hit 20 days for a chain of posting a comment to at least one other blog every day, since I started on January 2nd. 🙂

One other item of note is that I haven’t gotten an ‘O for outlining yet.’ I’ve been procrastinating on my goal of brainstorming ideas for a new short story, and ‘The scroll’ has been ticking along pretty well based on the plans I drew up in December. But the O’s time shall come, mistake me not!

(And once again, I can only write in the B for today’s post after taking the picture.)

How are your new year’s goals doing after three weeks?

My new calendar of chain tracking!

To a certain extent, this calendar isn’t technically ‘new’, as I picked it up several weeks ago, at least, when I was just getting started on Christmas shopping. I opened it, saw how incredibly tiny the 2011 months were crammed onto their page, (16-month calendar, indeed!) and decided that there wasn’t much point in even thinking about hanging it until the New Year. And then I was distracted by other things, and wasn’t quite sure how to best hang up a calendar on my apartment walls, and so on.

But this evening, I bused on over to the Dollar Giant, picked up twelve colorful plastic clothes hangers and a package of nine self-adhesive hooks, so my Big Bang Theory calendar is up and in business! What business, you might very well ask?

Since I’ve been talking about the Seinfeld chain for several months now, and talking with Elizabeth Twist about her psychology of stickers, I wanted to have an actual calendar up on the wall to keep track of my various day-to-day accomplishments. I’m not as big of a sticker fiend as Elizabeth is, so I figured I could just write big letters in pen to reward myself for doing things:

W – for writing that day. (200 words or more.)
R – for reading a book or published story, 15 minutes at least.
E – Editing or Holly Lisle course stuff, 20 minutes or more.
O – Outlining or otherwise planning a story, 20 minutes or more.
B – Blog update!
C – Cleaning my apartment, 20 minutes or more.
L – Losing weight, ie exercising for 30 minutes at least. (I couldn’t use W for working out or E for exercise, because those letters were already taken!)
P – Posting comments on somebody else’s blog.

I’m looking forward to seeing just how crowded with letters I can get this calendar! Tomorrow should be interesting, as there’s a big ol’ historical note about the future of the universe that’s commemorated on January 4th.

Off to write a B for Blog on January the 3rd!