April Wrap-Up

Long-term Goal: 26 / 30 Days, or 87%

Short-term Goals: 71 total, averaging 2.37 per day

Daily Goals: 305 / 397, or 77% 

Long-term goal: Prep Merch and Website for Shop

Even when it feels like you didn’t accomplish much each day, over the long term, it adds up! It’s the end of the day and the last day of April. I have been considering how to justify my time over the previous 30 days. I’ve been feeling as though I haven’t done enough.

Then, I reviewed my planner, tracker, and daily accountability. I was frickin’ busy! I did so much stuff this month! 

• I have finished line drawings for stickers (they are about half done, but the ones I did are in the shop).

• Put craftraven branding on labels and shipping materials.

• I put my acrylic quote painting on the site as a print ( I also painted two more large and two small quote paintings and put those up as prints, too!)

• Wrote six blog posts.

• Created 30 days of Pinterest posts, scheduled, and posted them. 

• Created, ordered, and filled out website announcement postcards (plan to mail them tomorrow or the next day).

• I completed a test order on the website store (I am just waiting for the items to be fulfilled and shipped out).

• Rewrote the overly stiff verbiage on the website.

• Reorganize my craft space.

• I took photos of my finished adult coloring book pages and posted them on the site under a new project.

• Wrote and sent out issue #2 of the newsletter.

• I created, scheduled, and posted a month’s worth of Instagram posts (I spent hours on this, and now it is lost to the black hole of Instagram’s banning bot).

These aren’t even counting the 71 one-off tasks and the 305 daily tasks I did this month! AND! I had a much better balance of work and life this month, whether taking the day to drive with family and working in the evening or giving myself a luxurious three-day weekend.

Moral of the story: It’s important to note what you have accomplished over the long term. We don’t always see how much we’ve done when, at the end of a day, we only think about what we didn’t get to before bedtime.

I also think I’m getting the feel for how managing this small business will go—perhaps not all of it yet, but a good portion of it. 

The first half of May will be spent prepping for the shop launch: getting new merch ready, untangling any issues that crop up, taking photos of the samples I’ve gotten, etc., etc., etc. The second half will likely involve taking everything I’ve worked on these last four months and creating a daily/weekly schedule of sorts. It sounds boring, but I’m looking forward to building an actual job out of this. 

Thanks for joining me on this crazy adventure!