Creating Lena » Goals and Challenges

March Brings Change

Lena — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:37:09 +0000

Change of seasons, change of mindset … it’s funny how that seems to work, at least for me.

My goal to get off disability took one step closer to becoming reality yesterday.

I had a meeting with a business coach yesterday. It was the first time I’d ever talked to anyone outside my circle of friends online about what I actually want to accomplish. I was really amazed at just how far one meeting went to change my mindset from a “just trying to make money at home” to feeling like a real business person.

So to celebrate afterward I took a walk along the river. It was such a gorgeous day, and warm too… I didn’t want to come back home!

I found an awesome fallen tree trunk to sit on, that jutted out far enough that I could take pictures of the river in both directions…

This is the view of the Hunter Street Bridge, looking north…

And this is the view looking south…

And now today, I’m back inside and getting back to work.

I guess for today I’ll have to confine myself to looking at everyone else’s pictures of the great outdoors. Thank goodness for Watery Wednesday and Outdoor Wednesday so I can get my fix even when I can’t get outside myself. :)

Have a wonderful Wednesday!

Monday Morning Outlook

Lena — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:45:00 +0000

This started out yesterday as a “week in review” type post, but I kinda got sidetracked. (Story of my blogging life, it seems :))

There are times when I really wonder if I should be posting a week in review, because I don’t always get a lot done in a week. And this was one of those weeks. But then I thought that this is really when I do need to set out in writing what I have done so that a) I can see exactly how much or how little I have accomplished, and b) it will serve as a good incentive to do more next week.

One thing I’ve found that helps me in getting more done every day is to set myself a challenge for the day. It’s a tool I borrowed and adapted from a post by Robert Plank some time ago. Sometimes I make it, and sometimes I don’t but it really helps to have a focus for the day and to set my priorities. It’s way too easy for me to get sidetracked and end up doing a lot of little things, without actually finishing any one major project. This week I met two challenges, and have five more that need finishing up.

The two challenges that I did finish were:

1. Set up Lena’s Creations store and add four different designs of Christmas cards featuring my own photography. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now, and I’m really pleased that I’ve finally taken the first steps to getting it done.

2. Made an original video and posted it on youtube. It’s a short affirmation video and it’s also posted on The Acorn Stash blog. At the risk of sounding pathetically whiny, it hasn’t had very many views yet so if you could check it out and rate and/or comment I would be eternally grateful to you. :)

To keep me accountable this week, I’m posting my challenges here:

1. New products to be added to the Cafe Press Store
2. A new video
3. New content to be added to the Thoughts of Christmas blog.
4. A new issue of The Acorn Stash
5. A new issue of The Ritchie Report
6. New content on all of the blogs
7. A new Friday Special
8. Take some new pictures

I plan to write my little fingers off this week creating content. If I have to post my results here every day, then I figure that will go a long ways to keeping me on target. Then maybe my “week in review” post next Sunday won’t look so pathetic.

On the personal front, I’m still plugging away at my novel for NaNoWriMo. I’m way behind with only about 7000 words written so far, but I’m having fun with it. I went to a write-in on Thursday night and met a few of the other local authors who are participating. That was a really big step for my hermit self.

Oh, and I decided that I would set my fitness goal for next year to participate in a sprint triathlon. So I’ve been researching training tips and clean eating habits in order to get myself ready for that.

And that’s it for me this week. How was your week? Did you get everything done that you wanted to last week? What do you plan to accomplish this week? Leave a comment and let me know!

Have a great week!
Thanks for being here,

Finding Myself in Fiction

Lena — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:12:25 +0000

I read a lot of fiction … probably more than is good for me at times. :) And in each novel I read I usually find at least one passage that makes me think, gives me an aha! moment, or otherwise fits one more little piece of the puzzle that is me into its proper place.

But never, unless it was totally and absolutely required for coursework (and none of that since high school) have I ever attempted to write fiction. Until now.

For whatever reason has possessed me (or maybe left me would be more apt), I’ve just signed up to do NaNoWriMo for this year.

Yep, me who has never written so much as a short story in the last 30 years is going to attempt to write a novel in a month! Definitely outside my comfort zone, I’d say.

Do I have any idea what I’m gonna write? Nope. Not a clue.

Will I even get close to finishing? Who knows. I hope so.

But regardless of whether or not I’m successful — and I’m certainly going to do everything I can to ensure my success — I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to put a few more pieces of my puzzle back together by the time the month is over.

For now I’m going to dig out my battered copy of Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path and start getting myself ready the challenge. :)

Have a great day!

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo this year, leave me a note in the comments.

I’m Awake Already!

Lena — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:27:41 +0000

It seems this is the weekend for wakeup calls. I’m two weeks into my “End the Year as a Success” plan, and while I’m pretty pleased that I’ve got this far, I’m still not getting the results I want. I’m taking full responsibility for it too, and working at tweaking the schedule in order to ensure my success as best I possibly can.

So yesterday as I was procrastinating at writing my daily PLR Giveaway post and playing on twitter I came across a new blog post by Tiffany Dow. Tiffany really inspires me and I’ve been following her ever since I played in her very first squidoo lens building challenge oh so many years ago. She’s inspired me more than once to move beyond my comfort zone and while I haven’t reached her level of success yet, I have confidence in my ability to get there eventually. (If only I could learn to stop procrastinating!)

Anyways, in this blog post on Online Writing Obstacles, Tiffany mentioned two things that really hit me where I live…

First, she mentioned that she “cranks out 5 pages an hour for 8 hours” a day. For me keeping the butt in the chair long enough to crank out 1 page an hour is a stretch lately. But I’ve been working with a timer doing 45 minutes on, 15 minutes off this week and it seems to be helping. So I’m thinking that if I start slow and work up to a goal of 5 pages an hour for even 2 hours or 4 hours a day, I’m going to be a heckuva lot more productive than I am right now. And considering the pile of writing projects on my list, I really need to find a way to up that productivity.

The second thing in that blog post that really thunked me in the chest was “Don’t be an online hermit.” That is so me I’m thinkin’ that I need to change my brand from “The Introverted Marketer” to the “Hermit Marketer.” Except that, as Tiffany pointed out, being a hermit online doesn’t get you where you want to be. I am making more of an effort to be more visible and more engaging, both in email and on twitter, but I know I still have a lot more work to do in this area as well. It’s still way too easy for me to shut down and go into hermit mode when the going gets a little tough.

You’d think that two wake up calls from one blog post would be enough to do the trick wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong. The Universe wasn’t done with me yet.

My third wakeup call came, again on twitter, from a Mashable post warning that wordpress users needed to upgrade to the latest version in order to protect against a security threat. I’ve been procrastinating on that task for awhile too (are ya seeing the theme here?) so yesterday afternoon I pushed aside my wonderful to-do list and made a list of all my wordpress blogs and set out to get them all upgraded. Seventeen blogs (yes, I really said 17) later and I was pretty much in shock and disgusted with myself for the run-down condition my websites are in. Coming hard on the heels of Friday’s realization that I’ve also let my Squidoo lenses get totally out of date (which is what I had intended to spend yesterday afternoon fixing), it was a real wakeup call for me to get my act together again and make time to take care of what’s already out there even as I’m working on putting all my wonderful new ideas into action.

As a result of all that today’s major task is to get a schedule figured out that will take into account the need to update all my existing properties, add to the newest ones, get enough writing and promotion time in every day, and feed my need to be outside as much as possible before the snow starts to fall.

I’ve learned over the years that when the Universe sends a wakeup call, that it’s really in my best interests to pay attention. When I get three in one day it’s hard not to get frustrated and just yell “I’m awake already!”

Have a great day!

The Anatomy of a Failure: My Unreasonable Expectations

Lena — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:46:47 +0000

I came across an interesting post from Brian Kim this morning. He was talking about setting expectations, and since I’m always being accused of setting unreasonable ones, I just had to stop and read it.

A couple of things in the article really got my attention. First, he divides the responses to setting expectations into three types. I’m definitely a “type B” — the person who sets really high expectations for themselves, then crashes and burns when the reality sets in that they’ll never be met.

The second thing that really got me thinking was this line: “You take one action and EXPECT NOTHING.”

That’s such an outlandish way of thinking for someone like me, who in addition to setting unreasonable expectations also feels the need to micromanage the whole plan down to the tiniest of details. Can you say self-sabotaging control freak with a super-sized case of overwhelm? That would be me. :)

The more I think about it, the more I definitely like the idea of taking one action and seeing what comes of it. Especially when I’m trying to tell myself that I can write an extreme amount of content in a short amount of time. (At the risk of truly embarrassing myself, you can see the last, most unreasonable of my goals lists on The Introverted Marketer’s blog.)

And while I can admit now that it was a nice idea to think I could accomplish all of that, the truth of the matter is I had no real idea when I made that list whether I’d even get a quarter of it done in the three months I gave myself.

What Kim says makes sense to me now (a classic case of hindsight being 20/20):

“…you shouldn’t expect anything IN THE BEGINNING, BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOTHING to base those expectations on.”

He’s right. I can say with complete emotional detachment now that my content writing experiment was an unqualified failure. I had no systems in place, no real concrete plan of action other than to get up and write my little fingers off every day.

Now that I’ve pretty much squandered three months on an impossible task — so impossible, in fact, that I haven’t written hardly anything in those three months — it’s time to try something different.

The first thing I have decided on is that I will not set any content goals whatsoever for the next few weeks until I see what I can reasonably accomplish in a day. Instead of saying I’m going to write 100 articles in a month, this time I’m saying that I will devote 4 hours a day to content creation, and see how much I can complete in those 4 hours. If I do this for the next two weeks I will have a better idea, when crafting my plan for the next three months, of what I can reasonable hope to get done.

The bonus of doing it this way is that at least by focusing for the next two weeks on seeing what I can without expectations, I will have made a bit of a dent in that huge list despite myself.

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I had to open my mouth

Lena — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:20:06 +0000

… or at least let my fingers do the talkin’ without talkin’ to the brain first. :)

Wondering what I’m yammering about?

I’ve been working at getting more productive, and creating more quality content than a post or article every few days. My writing lacks consistency and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s my own dang fault.

So yesterday on twitter, someone said to post your goal for the week. And feeling totally exhausted and feeling guilty for it, my fingers (with no input from the brain, I swear!) typed in real quick … My goal this week is to write 50 original pieces of content.

When I actually thought about it after, I realized it’s not that bad. That’s only 10 posts and articles a day for the next 5 days. Which means I could, theoretically, take Sunday off. And it’s totally doable … except that I’ve only been able to manage one a day (and sometimes not even that) for the past couple of weeks. The huge list I posted for the next three months is in serious jeopardy of not getting done unless I can pick up speed here.

If I had thought before I wrote, I would’ve said I would commit to getting done one article a day. But where’s the fun in that? One a day is the very least I should be doing, and so that’s no stretch at all. I love to challenge myself and setting the bar really high is the only way I know how to do that.

Will I make it? Who knows, but I’m certainly going to work my butt off at it. I opened my mouth, and I’m not backing down now :)

(And yes … this counts as 1 of 50, and the official start of my writing week! )

What do you think? Did I bite off more than I can chew this week?