Daily don't work

Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone reading this kept safe and warm, though maybe not as safe and warm as I did; in bed with a terrible cold and fighting off the last bit of fever. My birthday was on the 30th and I had to spend that in bed too, instead of going out for dinner I had some soup and hardly managed a slice of bread to go with it.

But that was LAST year, let's look at that brand spanking new year in front of us!

Like many of you, New Year's Resolutions don't really work for me. The 'I will never again...' or 'From now on I will....' are bound to fail horribly. Goals are easier, and less hard on myself. 'In this coming year I would like to...' is far less strict.

I've been looking around on many art blogs in the last couple of days while being in bed, coughing and sneezing and feeling sorry for myself. And on a lot of them, I saw
people committing to certain goals for the upcoming year.
Project 365, 500 Words A Day, daily art challenges for a month or longer.... and I just think, Daily Don't Work. Not for me, anyway.

For the last couple of years, I have participated and won Nanowrimo- National Novel Writing Month, in which you're meant to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days during the month of November. If you break that down to daily word count, you should write 1667 words a day. While I've always won Nanowrimo, I've never written that amount of words every single day of that month. There have always been days where I write just a few hundred words, and days where I don't write anything at all.

In 2009 I decided that Project 365 - taking a picture every day for a whole year and uploading them to certain Flickr groups - was a great idea. I got a brand new camera for my birthday 2 days before the new year, and this was a perfect way to learn how to use it.

What I did not take into account was the fact that Project 365 means you have to come up with an idea for a picture every single day. I was not working outside of my home, so that seriously limited my options, and it did not take all that long before I was driving Tye absolutely mad with my 'I don't know what to take a picture of today' moaning.

Another thing I did not take into account is the fact that one picture uploaded to Flickr does not mean that you only took one picture. I know everyone who does this challenge will tell you that it's OK to post not-so-great pictures, but you don't want to post the blurry ones, the ones where you see your finger in front of the lense or the one you took in the park of this cute little squirrel, but in the background you can see your dog having a poo. Or maybe you do keep that one, just for laughs. My point is, 'one picture a day' means you take at least 10, and that you have to sort through them. And maybe cut them down a bit before uploading. And then you have to do the actual uploading and labelling and posting to groups. That 'one picture a day' thing quickly turns into an hour's work.
Not that that's a bad thing, not at all, but it's something I had not thought about when I took the challenge.

In my Flickr set for Project 365 it says that there is only 363 pictures there, when I know for absolute 100% fact that I took pictures every single day, and have not missed one. The messing up happened when I was on holiday and could not do my editing and posting, and I lost track of the numbers.

My point of this blog post?

Yes, I have some goals for this year. Father Christmas brought me lots of art goodies, and I haven't spent my birthday money yet but am planning on getting some more arty stuff when I can stand up for more than a minute without coughing my lungs up, so I will be trying out more things. I will try and sketch more, play with the amazing water colour set I got, I am planning on writing more on my blog, sharing more pictures and doing more videos.

But daily challenges don't work for me. Just so you know.