2023 and me

5 Jan

Well, I started out thinking I’d be reviewing my year, but instead I am thinking about one thing that I have always found hard, and a new way of approaching it, and the results.

Being organised is a huge bugbear for me. I’m not great at it at all. I have all these plans to get stuff done going into the day, but get distracted by various things, and only get a fraction of what I wanted to get done, done. And that can also become an excuse to procrastinate as well – I didn’t get to x and y today, but I’ll get to them over the next few days. And on and on.

In 2023 I became more aware of neurodivergence generally, and in particular ADHD. I decided to use the vast library of the Internet to learn about coping strategies, and this has really helped me be more organised, and therefore more motivated. You’re actually getting semi-regular blogs now. This is PROGRESS.

It was also very helpful because I’ve been doing something very new and rather challenging – creating and developing a website. Now we are so lucky in the early 21st century, in that Internet technology has made it possible to create a virtual shop to exhibit and sell your art, but you still have to figure out all the associated gewgaws. There’s SEO for example. And figuring out all that’s involved in shipping items. And promoting the website, the artworks, everything on social media. Having template platforms like SquareSpace is an absolute godsend, and I’ve learned a lot.

Of course I had the usual ‘oh, this is HARD, I don’t get it, it’s not working for me, I don’t want to do it’ when I started out with it – new stuff is always tough. But I stuck with it. In doing so, I started working on changing some bad habits for better ones, like procrastination. Instead of abandoning a task because it was hard and/or boring, I would set a timer and tell myself I would work on it for half an hour and see how far I got. Instead of trying to do a long list of tasks on one day, I would decide to do just one today, and focus on getting that done. And then I might look at my list and pick another task to work on. So now, by the time I get to the end of the week, there’s only one or two tasks left to do on the list.

I also learned about making goals. I took the radical decision to focus on achieving one goal in 2024, which is to grow my website and get it ranking significantly in search engines and make sales. Part of this involves working on The Book About Me (the working title), which I plan to initially release as a free e-book, and this is leading me to check out apps like Canva for graphic design possibilities. So this one goal has a lot included in it. The book is currently in progress, I’m happy to say. Who knows, there may be a hard-copy version at some point, we do have Print On Demand now ….

2023 has been a year of learning to deal with the overwhelm, and overcome anxiety. And part of me wants to continue writing about other things I’d like to do – but that’s distracting. So I will end this blog post here, and make some notes for tasks to do over the next few days, and block time for working on The Book About Me (working title) over the next 2 months. Updates will come as events warrant.

In the meantime, may you have a happy and productive 2024!