Mid-Year Creative Reset: Reflection & Plans for the Future
At the beginning of this year, I got super excited and motivated about the chance to make this new year MY YEAR for getting things rolling with my creative business so I set a bunch of goals for myself.
In fact, the first video that I posted on YouTube, after taking a 5 or 6 year break, talked about the goals that I had for this coming year.
Since the beginning of last year, I had already gotten into the habit of breaking my year up into quarters and dividing different goals and projects into the four quarters. This has made achieving my goals a bit more manageable and also allows me revisit and pivot, if needed.
This year, I’ve also been trying to give myself a word of the quarter or theme of the quarter to remind myself of the overall feeling that I’m trying to accomplish for the specific quarter. At first, I was also trying to create moodboards for myself but I haven’t been great at keeping up with that part.
Q1 Reflection
In Q1, the word of the quarter that I chose was “Visibility”. Now, in hindsight, I probably could’ve picked a better word BUT the main idea that I was trying to focus on in that quarter was putting myself out there. I wanted to break out of some shyness that I felt around being on camera and get in the habit of filming myself more, talking to the camera more, and letting the world know more about what I do.
So, how did Q1 actually go for me?
The highlights: I re-started my YouTube channel, I launched my Illustrators Roadmap freebie for Affinity Designer artists, and I also started my Patreon community
The challenges: I felt like I kept putting off a lot of goals that I was setting for myself each week and also felt like I was letting a lot of distractions get in my way.
I actually realized this challenge after filming a “week in my life” style of vlog and as I was editing and watching the video back, I just wasn’t happy with how that week went. I felt like I wasn’t disciplined enough and that I could have done a lot more than I actually did.
Q2 Reflection
After reflecting on Q1, I decided that for Q2, my word of the quarter was going to be “Focus”. I knew that I wanted to publish my new planner collection at the end of the quarter and, at the time, I had already committed to taking part in a daily challenge so I knew that I needed to be really organized with my time in order to make both things a success.
I already had a couple of tools that were helping to stay a bit organized and these were things that I had created at the beginning of the year.
The first tool was my Quarter Creative Planner in Notion and the second was my Action Tracker that I used mainly for repetitive tasks.
One tool that I did create for myself at the beginning of the year but that I stopped using was my goals bingo sheet. Yes, it was fun to look at but I really didn’t refer to it after I made it and kind of forgot it existed after a while.
One of the big changes that I implemented in Q3 was starting to use my Google Calendar to block out times that I wanted to work on things.
Honestly, I had never used Google Calendar in this way before but it really helped me stay on track with getting things done and I felt way more productive during the quarter.
Even though following this calendar routine was a bit challenging when I changed from being in Mexico to being back in Canada, I still felt it was successful overall.
Some highlights from Q2 included:
Successfully participating in my first daily art challenge,
Successfully completing my goal to post Reels consistently on Instagram during the month of May, and
Publishing my new Seasonal Vibes Undated Weekly Planner collection.
I was also able to maintain a consistent posting schedule on my Instagram account without relying on participating in an art challenge. In the past, the only way that I would get new artwork done was because I was following design prompts and deadlines from different art challenges, but this time I was able to come up with artwork on my own and still created enough to follow the posting cadence that I had set for myself earlier in the year.
My challenges for Q2 were that I didn’t end up creating the Seasonal Vibes notebook designs in time to also publish them alongside my planners, and it was also challenging to adapt to the change in my routine from being in Mexico to being in Canada. Also, towards the end of the quarter, I did start posting on social media less frequently because I was determined to get my planners published and needed to focus on those.
Q3 and Beyond
Q3 has already started and the word that I gave myself for this quarter was “Create”.
There were a couple of reasons why I decided to go with this word for this quarter:
I still had to finish creating the illustrations for the Seasonal Planner notebooks and really wanted to focus on getting that done by the end of July.
Since the beginning of the year, or maybe even last year, I’ve had the plan to publish my first colouring book on Amazon KDP at the end of September. Even though I tried to give myself the task to work on a few pages a month since January, the reality is that I did not get as much done as I wanted. August was going to be the month where I would get the bulk of my illustrations done and I wanted to make sure I was really focused on getting that done.
In Q2, I started to get into the habit of playing more in my sketchbook and I want to keep that going. Even though there was a lot that I did in my sketchbook that didn’t turn into anything, I also created a lot of neat designs that turned into actual products, like my t-shirts
As for Q4, I don’t have any other plans to launch any other products, other than my Skillshare class. I think the last months of the year are really going to be focused on improving my marketing and continuing to talk about products that I created during the year, like my Affinity Design freebie, the Seasonal Vibes collection of planners and notebooks, my colouring book, my Patreon community, and even my YouTube videos.
I do plan on doing a full review of the year once we reach that point but, in the meantime, if you’d like to see a video format of this as I take you along for a day trip to a beach community called, Sidney, on Vancouver Island, be sure to check out the video below.