Planning each quarter or season greatly increases your follow-through for goal setting, and helps you stay in alignment with your vision. Here are some of my top tips for planning and reflecting as the seasons turn.

If you’re working at home—whether by choice or necessity—it can be easy to blur the lines between your personal life and your work. Try some of the techniques here so you can thrive while working from home, keep your sanity, and create a source of calm and peace.

I’m not one of those people with post-it note mantras on my bathroom mirror to see and repeat each day (and I love you if you are!), but if I were, mine would say THIS IS A SEASON. I recognized it and found it as a new parent—the baby stage in particular with the seemingly endless nights contrasted by the days that pass in a blink—but I’ve since taken it beyond that realm and found it true for everything else. As humans, we are not in solid states; instead we are ever evolving, growing, learning. Learning for me is a state of being; I’m always drawn to new skills and techniques for creating, and am equally interested in learning facts in some other medium or discipline. 

I've written this sentence (or some version of it) more than once: it's been more than a year since I've been here on this blog. Life has shifted around me, little ones have grown a little less little, projects have come and gone, days have gone unmarked, whole months lost in the flurry of a busy life. I've been craving slowness for awhile, aimed for it many times and achieved it only momentarily. I've often been after balance, but maybe this season is not about slowness or balance, but something else. School is almost out for the year, and requests for summer work are coming in. I'm trying to configure my days into something more than clear divisions of family and business, and that in between where they sometimes blend too much and neither gets the focus it needs.

Recently I posted that I would be sending out my first email newsletter soon. I wrote the email more than a week ago, but I haven't sent it. Part of the reason for sending the newsletter was to announce a new service, but lately I've found myself wanting to pare down. While I'm excited about the specific service I planned to announce, I am also considering the services I currently offer and what I (and my clients) can do without. As I enter the third trimester in pregnancy, my design work has geared up, but my body is telling me to slow down. I love what I do but I'm more tired lately, and my nesting urge finds me rearranging the spaces in our home, hunkering down with my daughter and watching as her imagination and curiosity grows. As my family increases in size, I feel the need more than ever to simplify and focus on the the things that challenge and inspire me, and that allow our family life to flourish, as well as my own creative interests and pursuits.