Happy January! Goals for 2018

So, this post is a little late, since people usually talk/post about their New Year’s Resolutions™ and/or goals for the coming year at the beginning of January, or, you know, right around the same time when their new year actually begins. Well, I, as always, am somewhat behind, but according to this new rule that I just made up, as long as it’s still in January it totally still counts as a New Year’s Resolution. Calendars are arbitrary, and time was invented by people and isn’t even real, so, whatever, okay?

My blog has not been super active in the year or so since I started it, mostly because I’ve been trying to find my feet, both in terms of having a cool blog, and also being a functional adult human being as opposed to a grad student. I know I just said that time isn’t real (my favourite excuse for not doing things on time), but actually, despite believeing in time, I don’t really understand how people manage their time and/or themselves in such a way that they can work full time, have hobbies, hang out with friends, blog, cook, keep their houses nice, spend time relaxing, and sleep?? It is a form of dark magic that I do not possess. Honestly, where do you all find the cognitive energy to constantly be doing things, and can you direct me to the source, please?

Figuring that stuff out is more of an ongoing-life-goal than anything else. I’m sure once I discover the secret I’ll become an unstoppable productivity superhero, but until that happens, I’ve come up with some specific blog-related goals that I’d like to focus on this year. By writing them out here, I’ll be able to revisit this post in 2019 and see how I did (good? hopefully??):

1. This is my main, most important goal: Post more frequently. Currently, I average 0.5 posts per month, which….isn’t a lot. Part of this is due to my aforementioned mediocre-to-non-existent time management skills, but it’s also due to this weird sense that I have of not being allowed to blog? It makes no sense, but I have this bizarre, internal gatekeeper always telling me I’m not knowledgable enough, not credentialed enough, not academic enough to have a blog about sciency things, and also that nobody wants to read it anyway. On an intellectual level I know that that’s kind of silly, because this is the internet and everybody posts whatever they want, everywhere, all the time, and it’s no big deal, AND YET I nevertheless still have this little voice telling me that for whatever reason I don’t have the right to do this. So, I’m going to try really hard to just ignore that little gremlin, and maybe follow Chuck Wendig’s advice on impostor syndrome and writing. But also, if anyone wants to give me written permission to post about death-related esoterica on the internet, I will not complain, so please feel free. Maybe make me a fancy certificate or something, with wax seals and shiny holographs? Please note that if you forbid me from doing this in writing, it will have little to no effect, because I’m already really good at not giving myself permission, and also that would be rude, okay? Okay.
2. This is sort-of related to #1, but I want to get better at writing shorter posts. In case it’s not obvious, I like to tell a story when I write about something, and fill in all the background bits that add colour and context to the main theme/subject, but that nearly always leads to posts that are 1,000+ words long. I mean, that’s probably fine for some people — I know lots of academic types who probably find thousand-or-more-word blog posts to be a nice mental break from journal articles about the distal pedal phalanges of Homo floresiensis or whatever, but for normal people I feel like maybe they might enjoy shorter, more digestable posts now and then. Also, I assume that if I write shorter posts, I’ll post more, because they take less time to finish, so it will be a win-win!
3. I want to take the first chapter of my MA thesis and write it up on this here blog. It’s about the history of the use of photography in visual documentation of archaeological sites, and why thorough documentation of sites in visual mediums is so important. It was really interesting to research, and one of my favourite academic things that I’ve ever written, and I want to share it! It’s not as boring as I just made it sound, I promise.
4. I want to re-vamp my About Me and Blog Description pages. This seems a pretty small and fairly simple goal, but it involves a lot of thought about how exactly what I want my blog to be and how I should go about making that happen. Also, tied into this goal, I want to get better at promoting my blog and getting people to read it, which will hopefully get easier as I work on goals 1-3 and add more content, which I can then figure out how best to curate and present. If you have any ideas in this regard, feel free to let me know in the comments here, or on Twitter.

Phew, okay. Now that I’ve written my goals down in a public forum, I pretty much have to stick to them, that’s how that works, right? Here’s to self-improvement and doing things in 2018!