How I’m removing #ROW80 stress at this #WeekendCoffeeShare

If we were having coffee….

Hi. I’m glad you could come over today. My husband’s out of town for a few days. He left way early this morning, and it’s quiet and a bit lonely here. I’ve still got some of our Starbucks subscription Reserve coffee if you want. They’ve been good coffees so far, smooth and not too citrusy or tart. My husband–who was not a coffee drinker when we met, mind you–decided during a coffee tasting that we should have coffee delivered monthly. Yeah, so there we were, up at the Livonia Starbucks, doing their last Saturday of the month coffee tasting, and he leans over to me and says, “Okay, we’re in.”

“In what?” I whispered back.

He showed me his phone with the confirmation screen pulled up. “I signed us up.”

I rolled my eyes.

Still, it is nice coffee. We have it ground at Starbucks, drink our first cup there. They let you do that, at least this one will brew a Clover cup before they hand us our coffee. It’s subscription exclusive, so if you want a cup, now’s the time to have it.

I’ve spent a lot of this week contemplating my ROW80 goals. The one thing that keeps stopping me is my blog. It’s my Number One goal for Round 3, and I expected to be all caught up by the end of July, today. Well, I’m not. Alex from the Emerging Writers group made an interesting comment on Thursday when I mentioned this. She said, “How can you catch up on a blog? It’s an ongoing thing.”

My current blog series scheduling template

I have too many things undone, hanging out there, and I feel as incomplete as those blog posts. Everything in my life–scrapbooking, email, blogging–is past due, incomplete, whatever you want to call it. I made a commitment to myself that night to make use of this round to focus exclusively on my blog: completing old posts and writing or scheduling future, ongoing posts.

I’ve searched the Internet for organizational ideas and inspirations, and I found a bunch of bloggers and YouTubers who struggle with the same thing. I combined a lot of those ideas into some Word and Excel files. I created lists or forms or whatever to help me map out my future blogposts, social media stats, blog series, categories, ideas and all that.

Looking at it professionally, what can I do in the Third Quarter to set myself up for success in the Fourth Quarter? Finishing or deleting old posts and updating my Pages will remove a large chunk of that visual noise. That gives me a month and a half, a more achievable goal than the three weeks I thought it would take me. Yeah, right.

I’m struggling with keeping up with emails. I had this great checklist idea using planning stickers, repurposing “hydrate” stickers for “email” stickers, but I did nothing with that this week, wasting 14 good counting stickers. I ordered a different set to try out. Who says planning and to-doing can’t be cute as well as functional.

I’ve been uninspired to call friends and family, and my social media plans are evolving a bit as I see what I have and have not been doing. I’ll tell you about it next week or so; I should have a better grasp on that by then.

I let go of goals #3 and #6. Organizing my phone photos can wait. Before my latest iOS update, I saved all photos to my external hard drive. If I was desperate, I could delete them from my phone and have a copy at home. I’d rather do something productive and scrapbook-y with them, so let’s wait until October. Same with my writing and editing. Start October as a fresh start, making Round 4 and the Fourth Quarter as productive as possible.

So, what about you? How’s your week been? What have you been up to?