I suppose it’s incredibly passé for writers — especially on Medium — to write some kind of year looking forward post, so here I am with mine. You’re welcome.

It occurs to me that I should frame this particular year looking forward in the style of this new theme, for a lack of a better way to put it. So, I intend to put to bed the last couple of years of doing it wrong, and chart a path forward into doing it right. The simple fact of the matter is if we want a world that’s doing it right, then it starts with the self.

I think I heard that in a song once.

The following items, in no particular order, are the things I wish to change, start, or carry with me into the new year.

The Personal

Everything starts with kindness

If you assume that this is the third part of a trilogy starting with my article “We’re Doing It Wrong”, then you may remember that I started talking about this in the second part. I think the bare minimum we can do as a society is treat people with kindness. Everyone, no matter what they look like, where they come from, or who they love, is deserving of respect and kindness.

That includes ourselves. Believe me, I know how hard that can be.

Recently, I was in a corporate training class. Several times within this class the facilitator implored us to ‘give ourselves some grace’. Now I won’t lie to you; when I first heard this line in the context of corporate training, it was an immediate eye roll. I’m a little hard-boiled when it comes to hearing things that sound like motivational corpspeak. In the weeks since, I have found that line working its way into my psyche.

I don’t know how or when it happened, but I find I’m not beating myself up as much. I also know that I’m not the only one that beats themselves up over the tiniest of things, so when I recognize that in others, I make sure they know I’m a safe person to talk to. That’s a connection with another human that didn’t exist before, and it reminds me of a quote by Paul Williams in his book Das Energi, “Each man is an island. Each island is an extension of the same damn planet.”

Kindness within begets kindness elsewhere. Start with you and watch it spread.

Declaring iFreedom

Prior to the invention of the iPhone, I carried a utility belt of devices. What I wanted was The Hitchhiker’s Guide, and I pretty much got my wish. The iPhone has combined them all into one, and I should have been more careful what I wished for. My phone rarely stays in my pocket, and it’s always in view. Now, I have a goal to regain ownership of this tool I possess, instead of it owning me.

I’ve never had any notifications or sounds on my phone. It’s always silent. So is my watch. That will continue. What I need to stop is having my phone in my hand, playing with it. It’s a huge time suck, and the longer I’m doom scrolling through Twitter and TikTok, it just demolishes any hope of getting work done.

One thing I know for sure: removing all the time sucks from my phone is a sure way for me to end up reinstalling them very quickly. So, I’m going to do something a little counterintuitive. I’m going to use my phone to keep me from using my phone. I’m not entirely sure how that’s going to work yet. There may be something new in iOS called Focus that may set this up for me, but at the bare minimum I’m going to set alarms on my phone for when I need to bury it in a deep dark hole.

Part of declaring iFreedom means getting rid of all the distractions, and so I’m going to create a workspace free of them. Working in a single full-screen writing app on my Mac, for example. I also plan to start wearing noise-cancelling headphones, and most importantly, reinstalling a door to my office that I can close.

A simple morning routine that even I can’t break

I used to get up at 5am, but lately I have fallen into the habit of hitting my snooze button and sleeping away my morning time. It’s really unfortunate, because that time between 5am and 8am is the only real quiet alone time I get during a day. I need it, and yet I also need to sleep for more than 5 hours in a night. I can survive on six, but I really need more than that.

So, with the understanding that your morning really starts the night before, I’ve been picking what I’m going to wear the night before. I generally sit in a hot tub for about 30 minutes before bed and listen to my Daily Calm. I make sure my room isn’t warm. I tend to turn the fans on blast while I’m in the tub.

In the morning, I hit the water before I hit the caffeine. This is the point where some of the high-falutin’ guru types tell you to practice gratitude or journal. My brain isn’t wired that way, and I’m not going to force it to do something that will end up frustrating me early in the day. So, I’m just quiet. I read, and I’m quiet. Did I mention the part about being quiet? As I’m writing this part, it’s 9 at night, and I’m surrounded by a screaming bird, melodramatic adult children, and a cat that thinks I should be somewhere else and wants to tell me so very loudly.

I like my quiet mornings. A lot.

Stop watching and listening to infotainment media

I am an information junkie. I’m the guy that watches C-Span, school board and city council meetings for fun. However, two years of a pandemic on top of four years of horrible 24-hour news cycles filled with as much batshit crazy as humanly possible has pretty much destroyed my desire to know what’s going on in the world. I have an acute case of news fatigue, or I would if what I found myself watching was actually news. It’s not. It’s the empty calorie infotainment of cable news, where they spend 2 minutes on the actual news, and 8 minutes with a panel of people that tell you whatever it is they think you want to hear.

Like a lot of you, Desert Storm was the gateway drug for watching cable news for hours, because you never knew what was going to happen next. All the ensuing Breaking News events over the years kept our eyeballs firmly on the screen. This is a habit I need to break. I have one guilty pleasure that I had intended to keep, which was watching Rachel Maddow. However, as it appears she’s stepping back from a full-time stint doing her show and pulling a ‘Carson’, it’s probably the kick in the butt I need to break this habit.

I’m cutting out all the infotainment and news out of my life. If it’s important enough I’m going to hear about it. I’m also cutting all the political content out of my podcasts and reading habits for the foreseeable future. The year ahead is going to be chock full of those nuts from here until November, I’m sure I’ll hear enough about that as well.

The bottom line is that I’ve found this has a detrimental effect on my motivation to create, and I’ve had about enough of that.

The Practical

De-weaponizing my Socials

Just like watching too much news as a detrimental effect on my creativity, the same goes for my social media feeds. I’m going to spend a lot of time curating my feeds to put creative content front and center in there instead of the loud and angry squeaky wheels that seem to dominate my timelines.

Far be it from me to urge anyone to do anything I’m doing, but in this case I’d like to make an exception. Instead of doomscrolling through Twitter finding reasons to be angry and depressed, why not eject those accounts and replace them with people and things that actually interest and inspire you? Does curating your accounts to purge the negativity take time? YES. Is it worth that time? I think it is.

Create a Workflow

As far as I know, I don’t suffer from ADD or ADHD. What I do suffer from is the ability to get lost in the muck of a project very easily. As I reflected on that fact, it occurred to me that I’ve never constructed proper workflows for any of the projects I work on with any regularity. I’m sure that constructing some proper systems and workflows will aid me in turning out more consistent content, like writing articles for Medium. But honestly, who wants to see that?

Create first, consume later

In a way, this goes and in hand with breaking my phone addiction. As I mentioned in that section, if I grab the phone first thing in the morning, it’s over. So, along with that is blocking out a period of creative time early in the day to create first. I believe I’m going to start with a block of 30 minutes after my morning quiet time where the phone is not in my line of sight to work on the project of the day. Social media time may be used as a treat for making good progress.

If I can hold to 30 minutes for a prolonged period of time, I intend to raise that in 15 minute increments until I reach a point where my flow gets broken. I find that after a certain period of time I reach a point of diminishing returns, so the hope is that I can raise my attention level to something more acceptable.

Practice Consistency

The hard truth is that inconsistency is the result of much I’ve written above. If I want my content to gain wider acceptance, consistency is key. I’m hoping that blocking out this time will lead to more consistent output. However, in the spirit of practicing consistent output, my intention is to determine some reasonable interval I can commit to, and sticking to it until I feel comfortable increasing my output level.

Finding that interval is going to be really important because if there’s one thing I can tell you about me, it’s that I bite off WAY more than I can chew regularly. I know myself enough to know that once I miss on overdoing it, I lose momentum. So it seems to me that starting small and slow is the way to go.

There is a downside to going small and slow, and that’s not being able to grow as fast as I’d like. The only way you make up for that is creating the kind of content that makes people want to wait. I hope I’m able to do that.

The Professional

Becoming more comfortable with promoting my stuff

I’m going to fill most of the readers my age with heart-stopping anxiety in one sentence. Ready?

Hi. I made you a mixtape.

Honestly, I think I’d rather gargle ground glass than ever do that again. But let’s be honest; the fun in the mixtape is in the making of it, right? It’s when you go to hand it to another person that the it all goes wobbly. I think it’s the same for promoting what I do. I can’t be the only person who thinks like this. I can create my art all day long, but when it comes to holding it up to the world, I feel very much like a nervous teen. I also get the horrible feeling that I’m a slimy little spammer when I post my stuff on social media.

I know where this comes from. At least, I think I do. It’s some weird hybrid of not feeling like I’m good enough to waste your time, and feeling like a salesman. It’s something I need to get over, because the only reason anyone would think I’m a spammy salesman is if they’re seeing my feed in their face ALL. THE. TIME. No one does that. So I should be able to post something I’ve done at least once a day without feeling crummy.

Also, I am good enough. That’s someone else’s voice talking in my head, and while it’s hard to get him to leave every once in a while, it’s just trying to stop me from doing something I enjoy.

Learn how to pitch and attract clients

With the exception of one person, every paying client I’ve ever had was a friend or family member insisting on paying me for my work, with me insisting they didn’t have to pay me BECAUSE they were a friend or a family member. If I spent half that time learning how to pitch and attract clients or commissions, I’d probably be much farther ahead.

I have to be honest, this is the one that really stumps me. I haven’t a clue on where to begin. It’s not for a lack of looking for training, I can assure you of that. Unless I’ve been staring a class on how to do this right in the face and don’t know it, I don’t know how or where to begin this. So, the first step as far as I’m concerned is finding some training on the subject, and preferrably one that explains it like I’m five. I need the Freelancer’s version of USA Today: bright colors, big fonts, small words.

Gain my first recurring freelance clients

Of course, I plan to make use of that training to gain my first clients in the areas of writing, audio and video production and editing, and photography. With that said, I believe I’m best served focusing on one thing right now, and I believe that’s going to be writing.

Writing is a lot like learning to play piano; it’s the gateway to a lot of other instruments. Anything I write, I can repurpose. If I can repurpose it, I can spread it around. If more people can see or hear it, then it should build a base of support around my work, provided I can follow through with a few of the other goals I’ve set for myself.

I know, I said ‘should’. Humor me.

Make my first thousand dollars in freelancing by the end of 2022

This is where the rubber meets the road. The ultimate success of consistent creation and promotion, and learning how to pitch and attract clients will be in my ability to create revenue from it. I may have set this goal a bit high, but I think I want to challenge myself here.

I want to generate one thousand dollars from my content in 2022. I think that’s a substantial enough amount where I can say to myself that it worked. If it worked to one thousand, then it will work beyond that.

Final Thoughts

To recap, I want to practice kindness. I want to break my addiction to technology, infotainment, and negative social media. I want to spend my mornings in quiet solitude, and block out time to create art before I consume other media. I want to create reliable workflows so I can create consistent content. I want to break the mental barrier I have about promoting my work, and attract new clients so I can realize my goal of making this work a source of income.

I believe that this is my way of doing it right in 2022, and I want to succeed.

So, let’s do it right.