When I was looking at the year ahead in December I was, as usual, up for planning and making grand goals that I would achieve in this new year, new me, new life. Blah blah blah. my goal was:
Writing
- 2 Weekly Blog
- 12 Short Stories
- Xmas Story
- NaNo April/Nov
- Shattered Worlds Novel
Fitness
- Gym 3 times a week
- Wunning (with a friend)
- Badders weekly
Food – Allot less and plan meals better
As you can see I set myself some good goals to try and achieve. But, I haven’t managed to get anything near these started. I’m disappointed in myself.
To date, I have been keeping up with Badders, and that’s it! I bought an A6 diary to use as a writing diary and looking back through it, it just shows how disappointing I have been and why I haven’t managed to achieve anything for a long long time. My problem is I have no excuses, my children are grown, we do have time with Grandkids and I do things with my wife but if I really boiled down to it I don’t have any excuses.
We are starting to work Agile at work for product Development and this got me thinking back to Kanban Boards and how this could perhaps help me. If I was to split my tasks into smaller chunks and then work through them, there is a better chance of keeping the momentum going. As daft as it sounds I can already see it helping. In the past when left alone at home while Trace goes out I would potter around and achieve nothing, or go on the Xbox. This time I looked at the board and moved this blog task down to the “doing” part and sat down. This is good.
Next, I am going to set up a board for writing projects, from the list above I had already dropped a Sci-Fi idea in the shattered worlds universe and have been developing one for Fantasy, although still set in the shattered worlds universe. I am quite keen on this one and I have been doing some writing for it. One of today’s tasks is to finish setting up the KanBan and then sit down to create the tasks so I can start writing this story. i have even added the Xmas story to the board as this is something I have been trying to write for years and given it’s a short it shouldn’t be that hard to do. But, it just needs to be right given what I am writing it for. Maybe using the board will allow me to break it down and get it completed ready for this Xmas.
I am optimistic.
