Goal Setting

I'm getting divorced. This has meant that the last six months of my life haven't been particularly productive on the animation and design side of things. Getting a job took a lot longer than I'd anticipated, and it's taken a few months since I've acquired work to begin looking like a sort of normal again.

So, I have a full-time job. My finances are kinda-sorta figuring themselves out, but that's a work-in-progress and probably won't have any real solidity until Thor, my son, is in school. Progress has been made on getting back to a baseline.

Baseline has never been good enough for me, but it's been what I could focus on while dealing with my own emotional apocalypses. But now that stuff is kinda-sorta evening out, it's time to start working towards my real goals again.

Step zero is defining those goals. I had a lot of time to plan a lot of things that involved having a wife. Those plans are kinda shot right now, because I don't have the sort of support I was planning on for some of those ideas. I can't just take off to Vancouver for the week for work and come home on weekends. Thor's gotta eat and he isn't a very good cook yet. So I need to really sit down and consider what my goals are, how far I can take them given my current restrictions, and what sorts of sacrifices I'm willing to make in order to realize those goals.

Step one is going to be cleaning up my space. A lot. I need my home office to be as uncluttered and professional as possible. It's been my slouching area for the time that I've been re-establishing my routines as a person who works, and that's not okay anymore. It's a working space and work needs to be done there. I don't eat there. I don't goof off there. When Thor goes to bed, I go back to work. In the mean time, I need to get my house in order and figure out when the recycling is supposed to go out because this shit's getting weird.

Step two is going to be cleaning up my schedule. I have a lot of League of Legends in my ledger right now because I've been using gaming to drown my sorrows instead of alcohol. That ends now, because I have work to do. I'm on a reddit cleanse. I'm reducing Facebook and the like to fifteen-minute breaks. I'm making stuff, not consuming stuff other people have made.

Step three is sitting down and finishing a project. I have a lot of projects started. Some of them with other people, some of them on my own. I'm going to finish one of the ones of my own because it doesn't matter if those ones fail. I'm not afraid of failing, I'm afraid I'm not going to fail fast enough to learn something for the next project. Three-minute trailer for a stupid kid's show I want to make? Well, now it's time to buckle in and make one using the tools at my disposal. Five minute short film? Time to bang out two or three of those bad boys.

Step four is figuring out how to make those projects into jobs that I do for dollars. But I'll figure that out once I've got the real work done. That's stuff for daydreams right now, and I ain't got no time for daydreamin'. I've got shit to do.