To do list for 2013

I don’t believe in making resolutions. It seems to me that they’re generally nebulous things made on the spur of the moment without much thought as to why they’re being made or how to achieve them, and that’s just setting yourself up for failure. You resolve to ‘lose weight’, but do you think about why? Is your weight actually unhealthy? Or would you be better off toning up a bit or trying to eat more fruit and veg? How much do you want to lose? How are you going to do it? What are your actual goals?

I do, however, believe in making lists. Lists keep me organised. They’re concrete and goal orientated. They concentrate my thinking so that if I put something on a list then I can be sure I’ll do it. So here is a list of things I want to achieve this year.

1 Use my time more productively
There are four things I want to achieve with this: a clean and tidy flat; more time for blogging/writing in general; consolidate my Spanish learning from last year; and more time for designing.

The Errands app is going to help
me get organised.

I was inspired to this by reading a series of organisational posts on the A Thrifty Mrs blog. I’ve already taken much of her advice and put it to good use. By thinking about what I want to do every evening I get more done. Last Thursday, for example, I’d had a workout, cleaned the shower, dusted my bookshelves and vacuumed, all before sitting down for dinner at 7. This meant I felt totally justified to watch Utopia and My Mad Fat Diary back to back, while knitting of course.

By planning out my evenings I seem to have loads more time and my flat is already looking much more spic and span than it ever has done. So far I've been planning on a day-by-day basis – every morning I write a list of any shopping I might need, the cleaning I want to do that evening, even the TV shows I want to watch. But I'm starting to plan further in advance – scheduling weekly, fortnightly and even monthly tasks. To help with this I downloaded an app called Errands, which allows you to create different folders for every aspect of your life and add tasks, along with due dates and times and a little box you can check when the task is complete. So far it's been pretty awesome.

2 Blog/write more regularly
Last year I tried to blog once a week. I did this for a while and then fell behind, so much so that there was a five-month gap between posts. This is not the way to get a healthy blog readership. This year I want to post three times a week.

This might seem ambitious given that I couldn’t even stay on top of once a week, but with goal 1 already working well, I have found I’ve got more time in the evenings and if I do just 15 minutes of writing every weekday lunch time that’s one hour 15 minutes’ writing time. That’s a lot of blogging. I could assign one of those 15-minute slots to other writing – fiction, patterns, and so on – and get plenty done without even breaking into evening time.

3 Improve my Spanish
I took a beginners’ course in Spanish last year and loved it. I want to carry on. However, I missed the enrolment date for the next course. There’s another later in the year, and the new organised me will not miss it.

Mi Vida Loca is a Spanish-language course from the BBC.
It's actually quite fun to do and gives lots of vocab.

In the meantime, I’m going to type up my notes from last year’s classes to help anchor them in my mind and do the BBC’s Mi Vida Loca.

4 More time for design
In a way, of course, I’m designing all the time – I’m getting ideas and inspiration from anything and everything I encounter, saving stitch patterns, making sketches, or just tucking things away in my mind for future reference. But I need to be more focused.

At the moment I just design things on an adhoc basis, just because that’s how I feel, with no recourse to season or fashion. Not that I want to be totally led by these things, part of the point of designing my own stuff is that I get to do what I want, but it can only help to keep in mind what people and magazines might actually want at particular times of the year. Designing a knitted dress in the run up to spring/summer probably isn’t the best idea, for example, but something in russets and browns for autumn could be great.

More time for more of this please!

How will I achieve all these things? By staying organised, by properly allocating my time to the various tasks I want to get done and by sticking to this schedule. I will of course update you on my progress – or lack thereof.