I’m almost at a segue with my goals this week. It’s partially because I’ve managed to complete all four goals I started out with and part of me is thinking “now what?” Today I’m going to try to come up with some new goals and still keep the reasonable aspects of them.

Last week was very successful in terms of my one goal: to do a rough edit of susurrations. I completed that with ease and did some audio editing and mixing with Gilles at Froghappy Studios. I’ve gone beyond that and have done more video editing and the titles. Gilles and I are meeting again tomorrow to do what will hopefully be a final audio mix for the piece.

So though it was useful for me to only have one goal last week I surpassed it, which feels good but makes me think I could have added another goal. I’m not convinced that is a reasonable way to think about it but there it is.
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Last week I had two goals, one of which I accomplished:

1. to make a rough edit of susurrations
2. to figure out how to deal with my email so it doesn’t take over my day
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Over the holidays I read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. It’s a book geared towards creative individuals that encourages them to look at their work habits closely in order to create ones that serve the work they want to do. The last five years have been a whirlwind for me, and since recovering from such a long illness and being (happily) thrown into a new cyclone of work last fall, I’ve found that I had lost a lot of the creative habits I had in place before we moved to Japan in 2003.

So it’s time to create some new ones. For the New Year I’ve made a morning routine that I think may serve my work well, and plan to blog in here weekly about my projects and goals. This blog became a promotional tool last year, which I am enjoying, but I also feel it’s not really fulfilling my vision of what I’d like the blog to be, which is a document of not only the work I do, but some of the processes I go through to do the work I do.

As a template for these weekly goal-setting blogs, I’m using my own version of Carol Lloyd’s “partnering worksheet” from her wonderful book Creating A Life Worth Living, which, if you don’t feel quite ready to deal with what Tharp asks of you, has a slightly less steep learning curve on how to set up a life where creative work is of prime importance. I have used this partnering worksheet on my own and with others in the past, but for whatever reason, feel that it’s time to go public with this sort of work.

What I want out of this is a public statement of “this is what I’m working on and here’s how I’m planning on going about it”, which I hope will create a sense of realism about my goals because I am very good at setting unreasonable ones. It will also make my process public, which shifts me from doing my work in a vacuum, to me doing my work in a public forum, no matter how many hours I spend alone in my studio.

So here we go….
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