First Craft of 2021

The last two years I’ve been doing this thing. Uh. Year-long workbook thing. It’s called Unravel your Year by Susannah Conway. Lucy Bellwood introduced me to it and it’s a nice, structured way to review the prior year, plan for the upcoming one, and then track the day-to-day developments.

It’s a massive thing, takes up a binder! I kept it open on the floor in my home studio, so I wouldn’t forget to fill out the monthly prompts and then to track the days of quarantine and my outside potential exposure events.

While I found this workbook structure to be helpful in a lot of ways, I also figured out my own variations on it that worked better for me. The monthly reflection prompts (“Where in your life do you need to slow down?”, “When did you feel brave this month?”, etc) typically just needed one sentence or even one word to answer, and I wound up designating the rest of the blank lines as a place to record my Accomplishments and Challenges— a list I used to be in the habit of keeping during the Business Ladies days (A monthly meet-up with two other small business owners. I wrote about it here ages ago and if I remember later, I’ll link to that post. EDIT: I remembered!).

Like I said, this workbook is massive and needs to be printed double-sided— something my home printer cannot do. The author recommends having it printed at a shop that can accommodate such a beefy document, which is what I normally do before the new year, but this time I’ve only just now sent in my file this weekend and I haven’t gotten a due date back yet so, obviously, I haven’t started yet. Which is fine, because I have some edits I want to make to the monthly-tracking bits!

I wanted to have the calender and Accomplishments/Challenges list hung on the wall so I wouldn’t have to stoop down to the floor to fill them out. Also, I edited the design of the calendar page to suit my needs better- bigger cells to write in and starting the week on Sunday, instead of Monday.

For the written list, I dug out this stationary pad that I’ve had for, like, two years and never actually used. It’s lined, so it’ll keep my handwriting from going all wonky!

Right, so I dug around in my basement looking for a clipboard I could hang on the wall to hold my pages, but then I re-discovered these twin frames that I got for a crazy good discount a couple years ago!

They’re standy-uppy frames, though, so I had to hammer on my own picture-hanging brackets(?). Matt only freaked out a little bit* when he discovered I was hammering on our Good Table with the glass still in the frames so then I moved my operation to a blanket on the floor and removed the glass panes.

*It was not a little bit.

(It just hadn’t occurred to me that I could remove the glass! I was hammering very carefully, thankyouverymuch)

Joke’s on me, though, because while I was evaluating my studio wall for a good place to hang up my new frames, I remembered, oh right, I have these picture shelves I can just set them on, so it was totally pointless that I’d hammered brackets(?) onto the backs of my frames at all.

The idea here is that I’ll just swap out each month and paste the filled-up sheets back into the workbook (or maybe my sketchbook...), with the new month replaced in the frames.

They’re at just the right height and angle to easily write on.

The pink highlighter marks the days I used my meditation app, and the handwritten numbers in the left corner of each box counts how many days into quarantine we are.

First Accomplishment of January: assembled my calendar-frame-thing 🙌

Matt drew a butt.

He drew it a long time ago and now it’s displayed where I’ll never miss it.

Ripley: I hung up the little carrot drawing you sent me last year! It’s on the right of the bottom calendar, see it?

Well, ok, there you go!

The End, good bye!