Why Traditional Planning Didn’t Work for Me
I used to plan anything from a week in advance to a year at a time. Inevitably those plans were very detailed and if I couldn’t keep up, I felt like the entire time frame I was hoping for was a wash and I just had to wait to start over. This led to a LOT of unfinished plans, abandoned tasks and goals that drifted back into pure wishes and dreams.
How I Discovered a New Approach to Goal Setting
Around this time last year, I discovered a Youtube channel called Heart Breathings run by author Sarra Cannon. I was hooked. I loved the way she used Kanban boards to show and organize her goals and tasks for the quarter, how she determined what she could realistically complete in a quarter and how open she was about the self confidence challenges she’d had to work through in her career.
I started adopting some of her practices last fall and while I’m not sure if I could describe my life as completely changed, I do understand better how to identify steps needed to complete a task, how to break them down into small chunks so I can actually work on them through my day, week and month, and so I don’t end up abandoning my goals a week or two into a quarter.
My Q4 Creative Goals and Projects
While I’m still not perfect at applying her methods and I have certainly adapted them for my own goals, here are the things I want to complete in Q4 2025.
- Crafts I want to finish
- Save the date cards for my wedding
- Cloak hood for my wedding
- Pumpkin tower for Halloween porch decor
- Make a set of boot socks
- Finish my crochet rug (which may become a blanket but we’ll see)
- Crochet a color block hooded cardigan
- Make a DM journal for a D&D campaign
- Make a tote/cross body bag for my walks
- Complete 2 more miniature houses
- “Work ahead” on my tasks for Tinsel & Trim
- Post content more regularly for Tinsel & Trim
- Blogs
- Spend more time being creative and making the things I love to create
Some of these goals may seem vague, and they are. I don’t quite know what “spend more time being creative” actually looks like in practice. It could be an hour more per week or 4 hours more per week. It will really be determined on how much I prioritize that work. Any increase will be a victory though.
Measuring Success with Time-Blocking and the Pomodoro Method
The easiest way to recognize success is if the project is finished, right? But what if it’s something you know will take hours and hours of painstaking detail or there are dozens of components that all have to come together? It can feel like you will never complete the goal.
If you are familiar with the corporate world, you may have heard of SMART goals. Now in my job, these can be anything but the big component of these is you have to find some measurement of success. Some metric that you can point to and say “Here’s how this is different from before”. For me, in terms of making time for crafting and completing projects, I have chosen to apply a time blocking method for my craft and creative time.
Because of the busy schedule I have with kids, practices, events, game nights, work, meal prep, you name it, the most I can usually manage to really work on anything is about 20-30 minutes at a time. This is where the pomodoro method comes in. I use this (also borrowed from Sarra Cannon), in parts of my day-to-day life. Sometimes I use it to help me stay focused while working, sometimes I use it to limit the amount of time I spend on a particular task so it doesn’t consume my whole day. Other times, it is just a marker of completion, as in the case of my creative time. I can set the time and get to work. One of the benefits I’ve learned from using this timing method is that even if the project or task seems huge, by limiting the time I spend on that project to 20 or 30 minutes, it doesn’t seem so overwhelming and I know I’m working on it in manageable chunks of time.
One of the ways I’m measuring my success is verifiably completed chunks of time. I don’t know how long it will take me to complete the cloak I want to have for my wedding day, but I do know it’s more than one. So, much like anything else, I am planning on doing one or two time blocks on a regular cadence until it is complete the way that I want it to be. Because it will certainly never be done if I don’t spend any time on it at all. For me, that is the best measurement I can come up with for now. I can always reevaluate it at the end of Q4 and see how it’s working for me.
Finding Time for Crafting in a Busy Life
Oh this has been the bane of my life for the last year. I ALWAYS think I have more time than I do. I like to be involved in my kids lives, I like to cook dinner for my family every night (or most nights), I like to keep the house clean, I like to spend time with my finance, I like to go to the thrift stores and find good deals, I like to do this and that around the house and bring order to chaos. This probably sounds familiar to most moms out there. The problem is, I don’t always leave time for the other things I want to get done either. So, how do you make sure you have the time for the craft projects you want to do? Well, that means you have to sometimes rearrange your priorities.
For example, I like to cook dinner most nights for my family. Seems fairly simple, right? Except cooking dinner most nights takes anywhere from 30-60 minutes. Easy enough for most people. However, when you’re looking at areas where you can gain some efficiency, spending 45 minutes at the stove top cooking each night can also easily be modified by making a meal in the crockpot instead. You trade off a little bit of time here and there in the hopes that you are gaining a bit of time back in your day. Another example: I like to browse the local thrift stores. My fiance and I both enjoy this even if we look for completely different types of items. Knowing that going to the thrift store once a week usually takes us about an hour, I can easily say “lets go every other week instead”. That hour is one that I have then gained to be able to use doing something else, like writing this blog for example.
We often spend a lot of our time doing things that could be done more efficiently or cut back on them entirely in order to make time for the other things that matter to us. Its all about deprioritizing something in favor of prioritizing something else.
When You Don’t Meet Your Goals (and Why That’s Okay)
Well, any progress should be considered a win. Honestly. Anything that moves you further along the track of completion is a win. You are farther along than you were last week and the week before that. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t complete everything on your list. I’m still learning this one and how to better manage what I can actually complete each day. And if you really don’t leave time left for it, you are always free to reevaluate how important that goal is to you. Is it something you want to try for again in the future? Has your life changed since you first set that goal and it doesn’t seems so critical now? Are you simply using today to better set yourself up for success in the future when you can complete all of your goals and then some?
Reflecting on What You’ve Learned
It doesn’t have be a negative experience to not complete a goal but it should always be a learning experience: learning what worked and what didn’t work. The last piece of goal setting doesn’t even have to do with the work to complete the goal. It has to do with the reflection on the steps you took (or didn’t take) to complete the goal.
For example, if you have a goal of starting a successful Etsy shop and you didn’t meet that goal, ask yourself why. Was it because you didn’t know what products you wanted to sell? Do you know what is needed to open an Etsy shop? Do you want to have an LLC set up to sell your crafts under rather than your real name? Do you have products made and you don’t know how to take quality photos and videos of them? Do you need better equipment or tools to make the items you want to sell? These are all ground work items that are excellent sources to set goals in the future that will move you along the path of a successful Etsy shop.
Final Thoughts: Turning Dreams Into Creative Action
I hope some of this helps you with setting those hopes and dreams you have down into concrete steps that you can work thru. Let me know what goals you’re working on and how you’re planning to get there!