Junebug on a String

The last week of the old year and the first week of a new year are my busiest weeks of the entire year.

I consider this a good thing.

It’s not so much a business thing (though stuff is often crazy busy with people spending Christmas money, or finally doing  something for themselves after making it through a season filled with the expectation of perfection and social obligations, which I totally understand…), as a personal one.  This is the week I clean up all the OLD year stuff, take some stock of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, and get set to launch off into the NEW year with a whole lot more direction.

No matter where it is that I think I’ll be at the end of a calendar year, I always find myself in new and uncharted territory.  Again, I consider this a good thing.  It means I’m taking risks, venturing out from the safe and the comfortable, and trying new things.  (It also means I make mistakes, sometimes spectacularly big mistakes, but if you’re going to sin, sin boldly.  As Mark Twain said, Good judgement comes from experience.  Experience comes from bad judgement. It’s all a learning experience, this life.)

People have asked me from time to time what I do to prepare for stuff like this — a new launch, a new project, a new year.  And I wish I had some deep and meaningful insight that would set the productivity world on its ear, but really…what I do is pretty simple.  It’s just a more in-depth version of what I do pretty routinely throughout the rest of the year, on a grander scale maybe.  But for those who asked:

First, I sit down with a notebook and a pen.  Or the laptop and the iphone, now that that’s an option.  (Secret:  I still use the notebook and pen, too.  There’s something kind of tactile about it, and I tend to remember things I write down, rather than type.  I type it, too, since all my to-do lists are digital, but for that initial brainstorm, I keep a notebook there, too.)  I make a list of all the stuff that isn’t finished from the previous year.  I also make a separate list, which I keep on Evernote, of things I DID finish, because sometimes, that’s a harder list to make.  (I tend to finish something and then forget it, which isn’t really patting myself on the back for it, which makes that whole going forward thing harder sometimes.  If you don’t know what you’re capable of, you can’t reach further, blah blah blah.)

Once I have the projects in a list, I start in with the to-do lists.  What needs to be done and in what order?  Who’s helping with it?  Who do I need to check in with?  What’s been done and where is it located?  All those kinds of questions.  Again, it’s a big picture kind of thing.  You have to know where you are in order to know where you’re going.

Once the specifics are done, I can set aside the practicals.  I start looking at the past year and figuring out what I did right and what I could have done better, and what was an unmitigated disaster.  (And there are always some of those.  It’s relative — I didn’t blow up any buildings or run over any puppies, but there’s always something that needed a different kind of attention.)  I try to figure out what the year was trying to teach me.  I think that’s kind of important.

So, armed with the new list and timeline (I put it all into Things, a program I talked about on the old blog, I think.  It’s got a synch-thingie with the iphone and it means I always have my STUFF with me.  Makes me very happy. And never bored.  As if that’s an issue.), I start organizing.  Things (not the program) tend to get disorganized if you’re not on top of them, and I tend to forget things sometimes.  So I do all the year-end stuff now — accounting and organizing all of the completed project stuff into folders, and clearing out all the crap that accumulates on the hard drive and making new 2010 folders for the stuff that *will* accumulate next year.

I do a little organizing physically, too.  Not as much as I do a little later in the year, when I’ll know what I need to access on a regular basis, but just the basic kind of clean-out.  Get rid of things that no longer apply, or aren’t useful, or are from activities we’ve abandoned for one reason or another.  Take an inventory of things like boxes and bags and tissue paper and yarn — see what I’m low on and add those to a list.  That kind of thing.

Once all that’s done, it is a MAD DASH SPRINT to get AS MANY THINGS on that “unfinished” list done as HUMANLY POSSIBLE.

No, really.

You wanna see some kind of whirlwind?  Come to my house between Christmas and New Year’s Day.  It. Is. Insane. I barely sleep, there’s take-out in the fridge, and a giant list on the wall over my office desk with things checked off in red.

I generally think that the fewer things you drag over into the new year, the better.  It’s like capping off the old year with a hefty dose of success, and to me, that’s a good way to start in on the new calendar.  So I get a little crazy.  (Er.  A little craziER than usual, at least.)  But it means that all those things that have one or two small little details to take care of are DONE, and I can start 2010 with a schedule un-bogged-down with the last vestiges of old projects.

Which is what I’m doing now.  I’m taking a break at the moment, but this morning, six projects got completed.  Or at least parts of them did.  Parts that have been sitting on the to-do list, waiting for attention, and now…I freed up the mental space to focus even better on the other parts that need more attention.  It’s amazing how well it works.

Oh, and one other thing — I always try to answer every blessed email in my inbox (or do whatever it is that the email was sitting there reminding me of…) on New Year’s Eve day.  Inbox zero for the new year, baybee!  Ahem.

(Does it mean I’m a total geek that I get into this stuff so much?  Don’t answer that.  I know, I know.)

At this time last year, I was driving through a giant snowstorm in Missouri, on my way back to Iowa.  I remember being in Kansas City, being completely unable to see the road, and thinking that if I was just living in North Carolina, I wouldn’t have to try and navigate that godawful storm.

A year later, and we’re here.

Life is strange and wonderous, isn’t it?

* * *

It’s Christmas Eve!  Merry Christmas, everybody.  2010 is shaping up to be a freakin’ milestone year from the looks of it.  Huge new launches, a whole new place to explore, and considering how huge this year was (for better or worse), I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen next year.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer them.  2009 answered a whole lot of questions, and asked a whole lot more, and if 2010 answers the rest, we’re golden. :)

Just a few of the things on the plate for next year:

1.  L&V is getting a whole new face and a brand-new playground.  Now that we’re back to having 100% pure Lime (yay!), the old site and stuff just weren’t cutting it.  We love our listeners, even the ones that say they don’t listen (WE ARE TALKING TO YOU, LA.), and this year, we’re hoping to give back a little.  It’s sinking in that we’ve got one of the biggest listening audiences in knitcastland, and while it still boggles us both a little, we’re working on figuring out how to make sure y’all are recognized for being the coolest knitters ever.

2.  Recaf is going interactive.  Check back after about March.  You’ll see what I mean.  It’s freakin’ cool.

3.  Oak River Township’s finally on the front burner after mid-April.  Until then, there are collections being blended, stories being written, and a team being assembled to help with one of the most awesome concepts we’ve ever attempted.  Every scent tells a story already….just wait until you’re writing them, too.

4.  KnitLife should know about the Smithsonian thing in June.  Which is about the same time as Mountain Sole will be gearing up to launch with patterns and much music and travel journally goodness.

5.  The Gaiman Project, Fates Three, is restructuring the way we’re delivering patterns, and the three of us are talking about when would be a good time to launch that, too.  And there *may* be another author in the works.  I’m getting together with him after the holidays and will know more then, but hooboy…it’d be awesome.

6.  Personally, when I’m not working on all of that stuff (which isn’t often), I’ve got the Chroma thing, inspired by 500 Pencils, that is really freakin’ intriguing.  (See the previous entry for more on that.)  A couple of people with other talents (I’ve got scent and socks covered….) are talking about doing something similar, and while it’s a sporadic/when-you-have-time type thing now, it inspires the living daylights out of me when other people grok the concept and want to play along.  (Wait until you see GoddessJoy’s jewelry on the same themes.  You. Will. Plotz.)

I’m kind of hoping that some scientist somewhere will invent the 40-hour-day in 2010.

I might need it.

Hooboy.

:)

Merry Christmas again, everybody!  Have an extra sugar cookie for me.

Inspiration often shows up when you least expect it, spawning from the most unlikely of places.  Some people say they get their best ideas in the shower (which, for years, led me to believe that there was an ingredient in shampoo that was like MAGIC IDEA OIL or something), and some only get ideas late at night, and some, like myself, tend to get them like shots out of the blue, seemingly random, when they really should be thinking about something else.

Like, ferinstance, what to make for dinner.  Ahem.

Anyway…

The other day, Teri came over and told me that if she was made of money, she knew what she wanted to get me for Christmas.  And when prefaced that way, I was fully expecting some kind of livestock, or a super-hi-tech chicken coop, at the very least.  But instead, she pointed me to the 500 Pencils website.  I believe she saw it on Martha or somesuch.

The heavens opened up.  The angelic chorus sang.  Tiny cherubim landed on my shoulders and began licking my ear.

It was, in short, awesome.

Consumed by the lustlike desire to draw everything in five hundred part Kodachrome, I poked around the 500 Pencils website for something like an HOUR, reading all the color names.  Trying not to make up stories in my head about them, since most of the names are equally as awesome as the colors themselves.  I posted about them on Plurk, and tried to justify spending $33 a month for the conceivable future (it’s a nearly two-year subscription) on something we can’t eat or live in.

In the resulting comments on Plurk, my imagination went a little crazy.  I mentioned something about getting the set and doing a scent for every color.  Or a sock pattern.  Or something, even if that was just drooling all over the set at regular intervals.

Someone mentioned that they weren’t sure they wanted to smell like Lobster Bisque, one of the colors.  This one, in fact:

And, again undaunted by that whole literal thing, I mentioned that soup is a winter thing.  And that lobster pretty much equals Maine.  So if you think about it, it could totally be the scent of a Maine winter — crunchy snow and ice, dry evergreen branches, woolen mittens and the faintest wisps of cast-iron woodstove smoke, all set on a backdrop of the Atlantic shore, with cold salt air just barely perceptible in the background.

It was too good of an idea.  I ran off from the computer and made the scent, adding in a little spice for warmth and just the right dose of black pine (which is *not* pine-sol pine, btw) to give it some depth.

And since one good idea deserves another, I grabbed the stitch dictionaries and whipped up the sock you see above, in a very simple and easy to do Seashore Rib, modified for socks.  (Picture *has* been photoshopped to look a little more like the pencil color, and to mask the real color, which was dyed for another project that isn’t quite live yet.  I wanted to pimp this particular yarn base and dyer, however. :>)  I took the pictures just a few minutes before the snow started here in North Carolina (an odd occurrence in and of itself), and now it’s up on the Oak River site if you want them.  (You get the pattern free if you buy the scent.)

Better still, I emailed the company behind the 500 Pencils club, and heard back from them today — they like the idea of this, and I’m angling to get some of those pencils in my hot little hands at some point, so I’m definitely planning to do more of these scent/color/sock things in the future, when I’ve got more time.

Sometimes, inspiration just comes out of seemingly nowhere.

I love when that happens.  Even if it’s around pencils and soup.