New Year Resolutions—To Do Lists and Thinking Time...

It's getting a bit late to wish you a Happy New Year, but the weather outside is so dark and dreary we all need as many good wishes as we can get.

I hope you had a good holiday. Coming back to work after a break is always hard, but a Monday morning at the beginning of January is such a contrast between the glitter of Christmas and New Year, it's hard to take. That's why New Year Resolutions are a good idea. We can all write our hopes and dreams on a clean sheet.

It's my ambition to give everyone an affordable escape from everyday life through my writing. You can find all my titles on my website, and to find out about future releases, sign up to my mailing list. I only issue a couple of newsletters a year, because there's so much admin (tax, scheduling, promotion, publicity, etc. etc. etc...) to do when you're self-employed, in the past year I've spent more time wrestling with computer programs and spreadsheets than I've spent writing!

That's going to change in 2016. From now on I'm going to spend Sunday nights drawing up a to do list for the following week. Writing two thousand words per day is going to be right on top of each one. Nothing else must get in the way—not checking my emails, my phone, or the greenhouses, or the bees! Once my real work is out of the way, that should leave me an hour each day for the dreaded paperwork, and plenty of time for social media, too.

I'm going to schedule an hour each Thursday as thinking time. That will let me review the working week so far, and add any urgent jobs to my to do list so I can get them done before the weekend.

Have you made any New Year's Resolutions? Follow this blog (there's a sign up on the sidebar), and we can cheer each other on!