- Hey designers, long time no see.
I'm back after my December break from making videos.
It's a new year, 2019, and so I thought,
what a better way to kick it off then doing
what I usually do at the start of a new year
and talk to you about my goals for the year ahead.
I love a new year.
I've talked about this before.
But I love the fresh start that it brings.
I think I just love the idea of a reset
or a fresh start in general.
Like every new month, I'm like, okay,
what am I gonna improve on from last month?
What didn't I like about what I was doing?
Can I change it?
Even every Monday.
I actually like Mondays 'cause it feels like a fresh start.
Like new week, you can forgive yourself
for any bad habits, whatever
that you slipped into the previous week and try again.
And so a new year is great
and I know people hate on New Year's resolutions,
but I think it's a really good time of year to set goals
and think about what you want your year to be like
and what you want your life to be like.
(perky, upbeat music)
Before I get into this year in the plans,
I just want to reflect a little bit on last year.
You would have seen,
if you watched my five years on YouTube video
that I do every October at my YouTube anniversary
and in that I talked about the fact
that I did a lot of travel in 2018.
There was just a lot of trips.
Work trips, conferences, a few trips just for fun, as well.
Yeah, a lot of travel.
And that meant that a lot of the projects
that I wanted to work on, I didn't get to
just because travel takes up a lot of your time.
It's not just the time that you're on the trip
or you're on the plane.
There's also the preparing for it
and the recovering once you're home from it.
So, yeah.
Going into 2019, I'm aware that I will have a lot of travel,
perhaps not as much as 2018,
but yeah, still quite a lot.
And I am adjusting my expectations
of what projects I can do accordingly
'cause overall I think I felt pretty disappointed
in what I got done in 2018,
which is ridiculous because I did a lot
and it was a great year in general.
And so yeah, if I don't set those expectations on myself,
then I won't feel disappointed.
Do you see my logic?
So aside from that, aside from resetting my expectations
on what I can achieve in a year for going into 2019,
the other thing I want to correct and work on
that was an issue for me in 2018 was overwhelm.
I spent a lot of the year feeling overwhelmed.
Because of travel but also just because of the amount
of stuff I take on and I don't know,
I think I had a pretty haphazard approach to things in 2018
and that's definitely something I want to work on
and just strive for a lot more balance.
Early this year I got to be in a session with Shawn Blanc
who is the creator of The Focus Course
which I've forgotten and I've raved about before.
I really loved it and it really gave me a lot of clarity
and a lot of help in figuring out
what I want my life to be like
and would highly recommend.
But in the session that I was on
it was like a thing we got to do through work,
he was talking about overwhelm
and how usually it comes from either two things.
It's either a lack of clarity,
like you're not clear on
what you're supposed to be focused on
so that makes you feel overwhelmed
or lack of margin where you just don't have the time
or the resources or whatever.
There's no space to do the thing you need to do
and so that's why you feel overwhelmed.
To me, I think lack of margin
is the main reason for my overwhelm.
And mostly that's my own fault.
Work is overwhelming sometimes.
I think that happens especially working in tech
but a lot of the overwhelm I feel
is just to do with my own personal stuff.
It's all stuff that I've decided to do myself.
No one else is making me do it
and I've taken it on myself.
So it's like taking ownership of that
and wanting to do some things to correct it
and give myself some more margin in 2019.
So to get to the point,
what I'm trying to say is my overarching goal
for 2019 is balance.
I want to feel like I live a more balanced life.
I know that there will be times that are stressful
and I know there will be times that I'm a bit overwhelmed.
But I don't want that to be a constant state.
And I feel like I'm overwhelmed more than I'm not,
if that makes sense.
And that's just not healthy.
There is a lot of projects and stuff that I want to do
obviously, which I'm gonna get into in a second.
But it feels really good to me to be setting balance
as the main goal because that means
that I can't work on a project if it's
at the expense of the balance goal
because that's the most important one.
Am I explaining that right?
My challenge is gonna be finding a way
to do all the stuff that I want to do,
in a way that doesn't overwhelm me
and doesn't make me feel stressed on a regular basis.
I just want to make sure
that I am taking care of myself and enjoying life.
I'm not just saying this,
I have a plan for how I can hopefully achieve it.
The first one, let's talk about the projects
that I want to do.
In order to fit things in,
in a way that doesn't make me feel overwhelmed,
I've decided to break my year up into quarters.
We do this at work and so it makes sense
to do this in my side work as well.
I think this is going to help bring me more focus
and it's also gonna stop me from feeling guilty
that there's a project I haven't started on yet.
You know, I've thought ahead, I've planned it out
and I know when I am going to start it
so I can forget about it until then, essentially.
And case you're interested,
I thought I'd just read off my phone
a quick list of the main things
that I'm wanting to do in each quarter,
like where I've arranged them in this plan.
So, quarter one, Q1, January to March
is about getting the series out
that I'm working on with Webflow
that should be coming in February,
if not the lst week of January.
I'm really excited about that.
I know you're gonna love it.
And also building up my video buffer.
I felt like a lot of times in 2018
I was making a video the same week that I posted it
and it meant that I wasn't able to tackle
a lot of the bigger ideas that I had for videos
just because of the lack of time
and a lack of poor planning on my part.
So yeah, wanting to try and get that buffer ahead
and get that in place so it will set me up
in a place where I feel I am kinda on top of things
with YouTube for the year.
Oh yeah, also I have previously committed
to working on a freelance project with my friend Ariel
on building the website for her read-a-thon,
the Reading Rush is what it's called.
And that seemed really fun to work on
because I'm not going to be doing so much coding
in my job anymore.
So that'll be a good thing to do on the side.
So that'll be in Q1 and Q2, working on that,
getting that finished.
And also in Q1 and Q2,
something else I've previously committed to
is doing a conference talk.
I'm going to be speaking at HOW Design
in Chicago in May this year,
which I'm very excited about.
It's pretty like, HOW is a great website
and I'm pretty sure they're gonna put on a great conference.
They reached out and wanted me to speak,
so that's awesome.
I could be planning that talk.
It's a totally new one
about working as an in-house designer.
So yeah, Q2 is mostly those things.
Also in Q2 I think that I'm going
to take another month off making videos
because I've just seen how much I was able
to get done in December with doing that.
I wanna make a short course
about how to make a killer portfolio that'll get you hired,
just put all of my knowledge
and thoughts about portfolios into one place
in a structured, teaching environment.
So I think if I take a month off of making videos
that I can get that done.
So, we'll see.
That's the plan for now.
Q3, this is something I can't remember if I've talked about
in a video yet or if it's just been to my patrons,
because I tend to just talk to my patron supporters
about a lot of stuff in advance.
And that is, I'm gonna start writing a book.
I won't give you too much detail
about exactly what it's about yet,
but it's about design as you can expect.
It's about living life as a designer.
This is something I want to take my time with.
I've never written a book before, obviously.
And I want to start the writing process in Q3,
which is June, I think, if I've done that right.
This quarter also falls over the summer
where I'm sure that I'm gonna have more travel planned.
So yeah, just planning on having writing as the focus
for that one it can kinda be like a lighter quarter
which will help with my goal
of overall balance for the year.
Then for Q4, the last quarter of the year,
I've just got plans for some more writing.
I was thinking about using National Novel Writing Month
as a way to do a sprint of writing.
I watched Pat Flynn do this this year.
He was sharing everyday, his word count, what he got up to.
People were guessing how many words he'd write each day.
It just seemed really fun.
It seemed like a good supporter of environment
to be doing a lot of writing
because writing is a very solitary task.
And even though I would be writing a novel,
I like the idea of making use of that general theme
of a writing month for making progress
on what I want to write.
And I want to end the year with a proposal
and perhaps a couple of chapters written for my book.
Some other things that I want to do
to combat overwhelm this year is,
first of all be very selective
about what opportunities I take on.
So I already have talked about this
in my five years on YouTube video
about my new approach to sponsorships
where I will not let a brand sponsor me
if I don't already know and use their product
because if it's a completely new brand,
even if it's gonna be great.
I still have to take the time to try it out,
get to know it, work it into my routine,
before I could make a video about it.
So yeah, this just makes it easy.
And the same for going on trips
to conferences or anything like that.
If I haven't already been planning on going to it,
then I probably will say no to that as well.
I know that I could be missing out
on a lot of great opportunities with this
but it's just a time in my life
where there's other things I want to focus on.
So yeah, gotta find that margin from somewhere,
so this is where I'm choosing to take it from.
I think it's gonna be a good year.
The start of it's definitely gonna be busy.
There's a lot that I'm planning on doing,
as you've heard, in that first half.
But, it'll free me up, you know, and have things in place,
basically setting myself up for the rest of my year
to focus on getting some much bigger things done
that are going to be like years in the making.
I keep focusing on projects
that are short and could be done in a condensed time frame
and I just wanna work on some stuff that's a bit bigger.
So yeah, next year is about starting that journey
and making sure that in my career I am going
in the direction I want to go
and making sure it's filled with the things
that I want it to be filled with.
So, that's my approach to 2019, striving for balance,
we'll see if I can do it.
You'll no doubt be kept up to date on that in my vlogs.
And in things like that which will be coming back for sure.
I'd love to hear about what your plans are for 2019.
Is there a specific project you wanna get done?
Is there an overarching theme for the year
that you wanna have?
Tell me about it down below on the comments.
I think it's really good to voice your goals out loud
because I think if you keep them in your head,
then it's easy to A, forget about them
and B, not focus on them as much
or actually come up with a plan for how to achieve it.
I feel like once you say something,
once it's written down,
that's when you actually treat it as important.
Thank you for watching this video.
Thank you for listening to me ramble.
This is a long video to come back with, I know that.
I did miss you, I miss talking to you.
I hope you enjoyed watching it.
Give it a thumbs up if you did.
And let's go have a great year everyone.
It's gonna be good.
I can feel it.
All right, I'll see you next time, bye.
(perky, upbeat music)