Time Management Tuesday: The Recapitulation Post, 2024!

I'm at it again, folks. Recapitulating, this time for 2024. I've been doing this since 2012. My ability to stick with things is impressive, isn't it? For what it is worth? Here you can read about the Yoga Journal article that inspired my annual recapitulation. 

What recapitulation involves, for my purposes, is going over the work goals and objectives I created back in January and assessing how I did with them. Among other things, it helps set me up for creating work goals and objectives for the next year.

I've got to say, 2024 was productive as far as, you know, productivity is concerned, but December had a lot of rejection. Not leaving the year on as much of a high as I should be.

Goal 1. Adult Essays, Short Stories, and Humor

Objectives:

• Complete a rough draft of something every week. (Nope. Not even close. In fact, I spent several months working on one traditional length short story. It was a situation I'd been thinking about writing about for a long time, so there's that.)
• Submit something somewhere every month. (I made 72 submissions this year. So, yeah, I nailed this one. Those 72 submissions resulted in 13 acceptances/publications. The most submissions done and acceptances I've ever had.)
• Increase my reading of short form work and journals that publish them. (Tried. Got a plan for next year. Plans are good.)
• Spend more time with essay writing Facebook group. (Again, nope.)
• Research changing membership at Medium and perhaps change it. (Did that, for what it was worth.)
• Take short-form writing workshops. (Took eight.)

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to agents

Objectives:

• Continue researching agents. (Yes. This is so tedious. I read about people who submit to a hundred agents for a project. How? They find that many people interested in their genre, age group, etc.? Because I don't.)
• Write a submission letter. (Yup.)
• Make submissions. (Eighteen submissions. I also submitted other book-length work to 13 agents. I believe the last of those rejections came in this month.)

Goal 3. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

Objectives:

• Update the short-form writing links on website. (Done. But needs to be done again.)
• Provide social media support for other writers. (Yes, primarily for local writers, but also with the Annotated Reading posts. Also attended a couple of local author events.)
• Attend virtual events for other writers. (Didn't see many of these this year.)
• Be more organized about marketing own short-form work. (Define "organized.")
• Continue Original Content and promote posts. (Yes.)

Goal 4. 19th Century Novel, which is totally just for fun

Objectives:

• Research the fun stuff. (Well, I collected fun stuff.)
• Organize research of fun stuff. (I actually did that this past month.)
• Blueprint some fun parts. (Maybe in my mind?)
• Write bits and pieces, if they're fun. (A couple of bits.)
• Read more historical fiction and nonfiction. (Yes.)

Note that I had three real goals this year. My plan was to do more of certain types of writing by not spreading myself as thin. That did work, but it could have worked better.