Personal: January 2007 Archives
Heh. It's the last day of January and I'm going to talk about resolutions. Actually, I'm going to talk about how I'm not going to make them. Clearly if you're not going to make resolutions, it really doesn't matter what day you decide not to make them on.
Most of this month I've been trying to decide about the whole issue of resolutions and whether to have them or not. The sad fact of the matter is that I start out with the best of intentions, but I rarely stick to what I've resolved to do at the beginning of the year. It doesn't matter whether I'm resolving to eat better, work out more or pick up a new knitting technique, if I don't feel motivated to do something, or more to the point, I feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task, I just won't really even get started on trying to accomplish it. And then there's the issue of predicting what will be important to me for a whole year. I live firmly in the camp of "life's too short to spend it doing things that make you miserable or don't interest you". So, in general, resolutions made in January are almost forgotten by the time Valentine's Day rolls around. I'm not even going to go back and look at the resolutions that I made last January. I can almost guarantee to you that I accomplished few to none of the things on my list.
But that said, I hate the idea of not trying to set some goals for myself when it comes to knitting and crafting. With that in mind, I decided that I would try a new approach to the whole resolution thing. I would pick one, yes just one, long range goal for the year. At the same time, I would pick one short range goal that fit with what was important to me in the here and now. And once I finished that goal, I would set another goal. That way, I'd always be picking a new goal that was actualy relevant.
The first short term goal for the year was cleaning up my blog front page. I moved all my completed projects out of my WIP list in the side bar into my Gallery (yes, 2006 was a very sock filled year) and I retired the Family Sock Challenge. I have to admit to a lot of guilt about not really wrapping that up in a graceful way. Once again, the best of intentions... But I would like to say thank you for everyone who participated, even if you only participated for a little while. I enjoyed the journey myself and was happy to see that I met that particular goal for the year (I think, perhaps, this is the only 2006 New Years Resolution that I accomplished). Goal Accomplished!
For my next short term goal, I've decided to inventory my stash. I suspect that there's a lot of yarn in my stash that I have completely forgotten about. I'd like to do more shopping from my stash in the future. I'd also like identify yarn that I will likely never do anything with and help it move along it's way into a place where it will get used. Seems like that would be easier if I had an inventory to help me keep track of my yarn. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through this project. So I think success is a possibilty.
On the long term goal side, I've decided to set two, one related to my personal life, and one related specifically to knitting. The personal one is a simple, but important one. I want to end every day with a clean desk. I don't know what it is, but a cluttered desk really clutters my brain. In order for me to accomplish anything, I need to clean my desk. Since I work from home and I also like to design at my desk, I decided that it is time to get my act together and just make it a goal to clean up every night before I go to bed. At some point, there will be photographic proof of this behavior. But it does require that I take the task on tonight...
The knitting goal is also a simple one (and one that I've had before). I'm going to work on clearing out some lingering projects. Either I'm going to finish them or rip them. The project I'm going to start with is a project that I started this time last year: the Stained Glass Scarf from Handknit Holidays
My progress so far?
Now I'm off to start cleaning up my desk!
