By now, if you have chosen to follow my journey, you will know I am participating in Natalie Sisson’s 15 Days to Freedom Blog Challenge. It was the prompt for me to create this blog site, and has been a great way to generate some truly great thinking and strategizing around my business plan for this year. Now that I have gone back and uploaded all my previous posts to the challenge group, I am ready to catch up and publish Day’s 8 and 9 challenges…cheating? Maybe. But after a couple glasses of wine, and a crazy weekend ahead of me (birthday parties, hockey, etc.), I feel that maybe that’s okay for today.
Day 8’s challenge was aimed at setting ourselves goals, targets (SMART ones at that!), and laying out our plans to get there – I mean, actually filling in our calendars with things we need and/or want to do this year. For me, this was great, as I have actually been working on just this thing for the past couple weeks…at least listing a number of things and starting to formulate the ‘when’ of each. Natalie asked that we share 3 goals with the group, so here are mine:
1. Develop a fully-functioning business website by the end of February (will post an “under construction” much sooner!)
2. Attend at least one conference (likely 2 I’ve picked out for Q2) before the end of June, for the purposes of networking, meeting previous contacts for potential contracts, and of course, learning some new tips and practices!
3. Secure well-paying, engaging contracts to fill 30hrs/wk of my time, without a lot of advertising effort or need to convince clients of my worth, before the end of the year.
I know she also said to allow for some down time, and digital sabbaticals, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have some time to do this along the way. And if things get busy fast? Then I’ll schedule those in too!
For Day 9, today, Natalie asked us to identify one system (or sexy operating system, as she referred to hers) that we will use or implement to streamline our work this year. For this, I have decided to implement and integrate the use of Asana and Toggl to both schedule my activities, and to track my time spent on various projects or business development. After reading up on Asana’s capabilities and entering all of my one-year targets and plans (so far), I am already finding this tool will be of great assistance – and bonus that I have read it integrates with Evernote as well, my other favourite project organization tool – I just have to figure out how!
And now to get some rest before my crazy begins…(wish me luck for an 11-kid party for 6-7 year olds tomorrow!)
Efficiency in Nature 