Mid Year Checkpoint Take Three

Like every quarter of the year, I think I can start over on the same mistake. I think I can just re-allot all tasks, cramming them into the remaining days of the year. It always fails, and always will fail. How last month I thought I could squeeze five yearly planners into six months is beyond me. I have little to no time during the week to work on them and three of those planners were made out before I got a job. I'm just going to have to take everything at my own pace because these unrealistic deadlines are giving me an all or nothing attitude and nothing's getting done.

But while I'm at it, let's look at how my "New Year's Resolutions" are going.

1.) Weekly blog posts. No.
2.) Use up art supplies (and go through everything else.) No.
3.) Lose weight/exercise more. No.
4.) Comments on blogs, dA, Drive, etc. No, but working on it.
5.) Understand other languages better. A little better in French, but not much.
6.) Coloring. No. Not at ALL.
7.) H!P and anime. Yes for H!P, somewhat on anime. Not only have I been keeping up with H!P, I've been trying to fill in holes in my collection.
8.) Organize and inventory room. Anything I organize gets messed up quickly, so NOPE.
9.) Follow my planners. Still on Day One. Day One for two and a half years.

Priorities and deadlines just don't work for me in art (at least non-school art) except for two summers, the summers of 2007 and 2008. It was a passionate, stubborn, but horribly drawn burst of insane fan art. It started as fully colored arts and puttered out to an unruly stack of sketches that got thrown out two years later, in the summer of 2010, after graduating from university. But since my plans switched to commissions and personal projects, I slowed things down and the perfectionist came back. I need discipline, but not discipline where I set myself up to fail.

I'm just going to have to work through my planners week by week, even if it takes me several years to do it (after all, it does comprise what I expected to take three years to accomplish, two of which without a job, and all of which unrealistically.) And that means not just the art on those lists, but reading, too. I mean, I'll just be miserable if I deny myself reading (it's perhaps my biggest addiction), so I might as well do it while crossing stuff off. My lists should be guides to help me complete everything in a balanced manner, not a stressor for my "free" time. Finish the tasks in Week One before moving on to Week Two, simple as that.

This is the decision I've come to after the third such mid-year checkpoint.

So, see you next post.