Greetings friends! This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Year of You for Creatives: 365 Journal-Writing Prompts for Doing Your Best Work, which is out on Monday 15th November in ebook and paperback (hardcover and digital workbook coming soon!). The book is a guided journal, with a a prompt for each day of the year. Each month covers a different theme relevant to your creative work including mindset, growth, money, health and self-care, working environment, and much more! You’ll also find a couple of useful bonus chapters at the end of the book with a journaling template you can use with new projects, plus even more journaling ideas to support you with your creative work. In today’s post, I’m sharing a three of these… the rest are in the book 🙂 Enjoy!
Goals and achievements quarter by quarter
This spread is a simple yet effective way of creating a visual representation of what you’d like to achieve—and what you already have achieved—over the course of a calendar year.
Take a double page. At the top of the first page, write “Goals” and at the top of the second, “Achievements.” Then, divide each page into four quarters with one line down the middle horizontally, and another line in the middle, drawn vertically so they cross somewhere close to the centre of the page. With the double page open, you should have eight squares/rectangles total, four on each page. Label the boxes on the first page Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4, and then do the same for the boxes on the second page. This is your setup.
Now, start filling in milestones and goals you have for each quarter in the relevant box on the goals page. Unless there is anything specific happening at a fixed point in the year, I prefer to do this one quarter at a time, as a lot can change in 12 months! As the year progresses, you can also start filling the achievements page. Your achievements might match the milestones and goals you’ve written about on the opposite page, but I also encourage you to make a note of anything that feels like a milestone or achievement in your creative work, even if it’s not related to the goals you’ve already set out.
Monthly project tally
This kind of spread is useful if your creative work involves multiple projects at the same time. Although it’s a hobby rather than work, I use this kind of spread to keep track of my in-progress knitting and crochet projects over the course of a year. However, you could use it for writing projects, artwork, other kinds of craft projects, commissions… the possibilities are plentiful. It’s useful to see how long certain projects take, keep track of projects from earlier in the year that I might otherwise have forgotten about, and see a visual representation of everything I’ve made over the course of 12 months (as well as the works-in-progress I dropped to start a shiny new pattern and should probably finish at some point…)
To create a monthly project spread, simply divide a page or a double page into 12 boxes. Write the name of the month at the top of each box. Then, as the year progresses, use that month’s box to track what you’re working on. I use a checkbox system where a single line means I worked on the project and am yet to complete it, and an X means I finished the project that month.
Daily Tracker
The daily tracker is helpful for getting a bird’s-eye view of how many days in a week/ month/year you work on your creative projects. You can create a tracker for the week, the month, or the whole year, and it can be as simple as printing out a one-page calendar for the year and sticking it in your journal. Then, simply highlight each day you work.
This kind of tracker is useful if you’re trying to build more consistency into your creative work, or if you’re finding it hard to build a routine and you’re not sure why. Over time, you might notice patterns in when you work and when you don’t, which can help you adjust your schedule (or your expectations). If you’re trying to build a consistent working habit, seeing the days add up also becomes motivating. You might not feel you’ve been doing as much as you’d like, but if you can look back at your journal and see 5, 10, 20 or more days straight checked off, you know you’re showing up and making steady progress.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to check out my new book The Year of You for Creatives: 365 Journal-Writing Prompts for Doing Your Best Work, which is available on Monday 15th November.
Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash
