February 1, 2024

List 3 things you’d like to accomplish in February, no matter how small.

Laura Waltje
February 01, 2024

Hello friends,

I can’t believe we’ve already made it through one full month of 2024.

We’ve talked before about the importance of small wins for your progress on your goals and for your mental health in general. By recognizing our small wins, we sustain our motivation and gain trust in our competence and ability to successfully achieve our ambitious and audacious goals.

February can be a tough month for motivation. The energy of January’s fresh start has warn off and so has the excitement of the holidays, but the weather is cold and gloomy. Sometimes it feels like winter will never end. February is traditionally a really tough month for mental health, for me, for Andrew, for all of our friends. Consistently, it is a time when we all self isolate. The past few days have been unseasonably warm and sunny in Chicago, and while that does worry me in an abstract sense, in a more immediate sense, it has been great for my mood. A big part of my plans and goals for February are to be consistent in the things I need to make sure my mental and physical health don’t slip in the first place: good food, good friends, daily movement.

Take 5-15 minutes and write about

List 3 things you’d like to accomplish in February, no matter how small.

1. Attend the AWP conference together with my friend and favorite collaborator, Rabha.

2. Host a leadership retreat for our non-profit, Art Farm. I’d like to see successful team building, vision and values setting, revisiting and revising our mission statement, finalizing the by laws, and planning out programming for the year.

3. Write 2 pages a day. I haven’t made a lot of progress on a novel I’m working on in a long time. I haven’t prioritized writing lately, but I really want to. I know I am most creative and productive in the morning, but every morning I am tempted to do chores and tasks and tidying instead. I think part of how I can prevent that is to make sure that the house is fully tidy and/or officially delegate the morning tasks to someone else, so that it frees up my brain space. I’ve been noticing a lot lately that I feel like I have 100s of open tabs in my brain taking up processing power. Another thing I’ve noticed is I am able to get into a creative space much more quickly if I use sensory cues, so another small goal is to find an incense to try out as my writing incense.

I hope you will achieve all of your big and small goals this February.

Your friend,
Laura