Happy New Year!
Most people enjoy the holidays. I vastly prefer January. Less socially-enforced holiday cheer, more excitement for things to come. Last year, my goal was to keep tabs on myself with a constant paper trail. That failed miserably, for two reasons:
- My brain couldn’t be bothered to remember to write stuff down.
- My schedule wasn’t ever booked enough to require a high level of planning.
It wasn’t the plan, but I ended up with plenty of free time. It’s not as if I did nothing; I did some freelance work, got a puppy, lost some weight, and generally enjoyed life. But it absolutely wasn’t my most productive year. I could have pounded the digital pavement and found more work, but I found the calm, slow path I was on to be too alluring. I’d still like to do some life enjoying, but I also yearn for a bit of structure and productivity. As such, in setting some goals for 2022 (definitely not resolutions), I’m going to separate them into productive and unproductive, like this:
Productive
- Complete the Affinity Designer Workbook. This one’s a shorter-term goal. I really like the Affinity Suite, and find it an excellent and affordable alternative to the Adobe programs I was originally taught on. The only feature I miss is Live Trace; everything else feels the same or better. I grabbed the Designer Workbook during their Black Friday sale, and am slowly going through it to relearn hotkeys and remember the general vector graphic workflow.
- Send out a few more résumés. It probably couldn’t hurt to put feelers out in a few more places, especially with the larger amount of remote work possible.
- Develop a personal project. Technically, this site is one of those, and may end up as the project being further developed. That said, I’m interested in something less digital, though I’m not completely sure what that is yet.
Non-Productive
- Run more one-shots. I got badgered into running a session of Never Going Home last week, and really enjoyed it. That game never fails to impress, and my players get into it once they figure the figure out the +One System’s dice manipulations. I have thoughts about Never Going Home that I’d like to knock out a whole separate post on, but it’s just one of the games I’ve grabbed over the last year that I’d like to pilot a session on.
- Finish my Hunter: the Vigil campaign. I’m on a small hiatus from my Hunter game, as I need to throw some time into preparation. The game kind of scope crept on me after my players and I found a groove and I got ambitious with weird plot hooks and ghost stats. I was aiming for the game to be over by now, but letting the players sink their teeth in a bit more has played some dividends, even if I’ve had to make a lot of decisions on the fly as a result. Hopefully, it’s done by the middle of next month.
- Prepare more gaming materials. This one borders on productivity, but for a purely unproductive purpose. Other GMs I’ve been playing with have been upping their game lately. Handouts have been made, music has been prepared, and plots have been gaining depth. I’m not sure about that last bit, but I could definitely be doing more to create things and plan soundtracks to just add that little bit extra to a game session. Iron sharpens iron, as they say, and other GMs putting in more effort makes me want to do the same.
These goals all feel more attainable to me than “document everything I’m doing all the time,” and require much less of a change in mindset to accomplish. I just need to do what I’m doing, but a little more and a little better. I can do that. Anything less is stagnation, and I refuse to stagnate. There is always a better me to be.
Until next time.