Getting myself back on track
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I need to hold myself accountable to myself!
My freelance work has been a bit quiet of late, think all my clients must be on holiday right now as they’ve all gone AWOL. But that’s fine, I can crack on with my own stuff right. Well sort of. The last few weeks I’ve found myself overtired and unmotivated. I’ve barely managed to write anything on Medium let alone anything else.
I’m leaking time every day.
Not literally but I’m losing a lot of time in the day where I’ve taken too long to do something or got up a bit late or just spent too much time not doing a lot. So step one for trying to get me back on track is to work out a timetable for each day. Not something I like doing as I like to keep my days fluid but it also highlighted to me where I’m losing time and how I can gain it back.
The other drawback to my schedule is that there’s not much time to rest or have downtime but if I want to have enough hours in the day to get my work done and work on my personal projects then I have to suck it up. I actually have a backlog of work to catch up on that’s only just come in so it’s the only way I’ll get it done.
Figuring out my goals for each day/week/month.
To keep me on track with my personal projects, and I class writing on Medium as a personal project, I’ve mapped out what I need to be doing on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. For Medium, that means writing a post every day and coming up with new post ideas every day. I’m not very good at putting out regular content so I need a kick up the proverbial.
Flow charts keep things flowing
I often to-do write lists and then ignore them. Recently, I’ve started making mind maps instead. Each map has one goal that I need to achieve such as make £100 and I map the steps I need to achieve this. Or a particular day becomes the goal and I map everything that I need to achieve in that day. Mind maps seem to make a lot more sense and feel less daunting than lists. Google mind maps for mind map software.
Holding myself accountable
Since I’ve done all of the above, I’ve become focused and have started to achieve some of my goals. I know how easy it is to slip (and I fully expect to slip too), so for now, if I publish this here, I can hold myself accountable. Just for a little while…