2021 Plans – The Climb #661

Monday 14^th December 2020

Today was a bit of an admin day. Whilst I’d caught up with all my editions of The Climb, I still had a bit of admin from the last couple of weeks to sort out. Some of this I had already started, such as going through my open tasks and rescheduling them. But other things, such as doing my weekly plans and reviewing prior weeks hadn’t been done since Shadowlands launched.

I’m starting to work on my 2021 plans, and at the moment they seems a bit unexciting. A lot of them seem to be carrying over things I’ve been working on in 2020. Whilst my initial worry was that this was just a long list of things I’d planned but not done in 2020, most of the carry-over items were things such as to continue The Climb, continue to read, write more novels.

As for new goals, currently I don’t seem to have any. In many ways, 2020 put life on hold and whilst I got a load of things done, there’s part of me that doesn’t want to go planning things until such time as we have something approaching normality. As a result, things like starting my own swordfighting school, originally planned for Spring 2020, are now pushed back until at least September 2021.

I think my only major plans for 2020 which went out the window were plans to write a script in this last part of the year, and fitness (which I blame on gyms shutting). All the other items either got completed or progressed.

As a result, I think 2021 is likely to be a ‘safe’ year in terms of planning. More of the same, rather than branching out too wide. But we’ll see. I reserve the right to revisit my plans mid-2021 and pivot if needed.

The thing I really need to pay attention to is my fiction goals. I do want to get a load of writing done in 2021 and it’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t want two stages of the same project back to back, I don’t want similar stages next to each other. Each stage takes a different amount of time. So I want to alternate between outlines, first drafts and redrafts with suitable breaks inbetween, whilst still maximising the amount I can do without losing quality.

The next stage is really to create a spreadsheet and start roughly blocking it out before coming up with a more concrete schedule.

Whilst that will be central to any plans for 2021, I don’t want my entire year to get lost behind it. Little and often is going to be the motto for the year, as I make steady progress on a number of things.

I accomplished a few big things in 2020 but there wasn’t a huge list of accomplishments. I’d like that to continue into 2021, but also move a number of smaller things along as well.

But with 2020 being so uncertain, I feel like going into 2021 with any sort of plan is a bit of a fool’s errand. I mean, a year ago, who could have predicted this year?