Scattershot Approach: Wherein I Knit All the Things

I spent yesterday watching the first four Harry Potter movies and knitting and crocheting all the things.  I think I laid hands on everything I've got on the needles or hooks yesterday. 

The upside of this approach is that I didn't get bored, and I could swap out what I was working based on whether or not I needed my eyes for any given scene. In fact, I may or may not have just listened to most of Chamber of Secrets... I can't crochet without looking, the way I can with knitting stockinette.

The downside, of course, is that I didn't make nearly as much progress on any one thing as I would have if I'd focused. 

On the other hand, while some of the things I've been working on do have deadlines, they are all arbitrary, game-based deadlines.   The shawl pictured above, for example, is my Order Mission in the House Cup.  It needs to be done by November 18th, or I don't get my internet points. 

I'm also working on a Boxy sweater for my OWL.  Deadline on this one is the end of November.  (I'm farther along than this picture shows.  Imagine it just like this, only more so.)   So far, even with my scattershot approach, I'm in no particular danger of missing either deadline.

I seriously considered watching more Harry Potter today, but I ended up deciding that my body wasn't ready for the emotional roller coaster of movies 5, 6, 7, and 7.5.   Maybe next weekend.

Who knows, maybe by next weekend I will have actually finished something.  Though that might require me to hold onto it for more than ten minutes at any given time.

So maybe don't hold hold your breath.

More on Planning: What Do You Plan?

Last week my besties and I tackled the question "why do you plan" (in the "using planners" sense).  This week the question is "what do you plan?"

What are the actual things you want planners/planning and journals for and to keep up with?

It seems like such an obvious thing - what do you plan?  Uh, my life?  But of course that's way too broad.  "My life" doesn't tell me if I just need a weekly calendar and I'm good, or if a bullet journal system would make more sense, or if I want or need to track habits, or if I'm keeping up with my knitting differently than I am my work projects, or...

Anyway, "my life," while technically accurate, is a completely useless answer to the question of what I want to plan.

So let's dig into more detail.  In no particular order, I either do plan, or want to plan:

Work projects.  I work in Organizational Development for a 4.5K employee company.  I'm the project owner for things like succession planning and annual performance reviews.  I'm working with a team of 3-5 people, and we're all across the country.   This means that we need a way to easily keep aligned with our progress, and to not lose sight of the details.   We're using Trello for project tracking, and it's working very nicely.

Actual Project Plan

Weekly and Daily Focus.   In my ideal world, I'd spend about 30 minutes every Monday morning, and then at least 15 minutes every other day getting my shit together for the coming week or the day ahead.   What are my major priorities this week?  What do I need to focus on today?  When am I meant to be on that conference call?  When does the current Quidditch Match in the House Cup end?  I have a digital calendar (well, two, actually.  I have a Google calendar that I rarely look at or bother with, and then my Outlook calendar that runs my work-life).  Anyway, every morning I'll look over my calendar and write my appointments into my planner.  It's completely redundant, and probably unnecessary, but that whole "writing it down makes it real" thing?  I think it genuinely improves the odds of me showing up where I'm supposed to be.  Once my appointments are recorded, I'll take a stab at generating my to-do list.  (At least that's the ideal.  The reality is, I'll start and then get interrupted five times, and then I'll finish filling the list in with at 2:30 in the afternoon with what I've done.  It's an imperfect system.)

Rough Outline of a Weekly Plan

My Knitting.   Come on, you knew that was coming.  I do a little of my knitting planning in Ravelry itself (Ravelry is amazing and has changed my knitting life.)  I do use the "Queue" feature to map out projects that I'd like to start in the nearish future.  I generally don't add something to the queue unless I already have the yarn and I really mean it about casting it on.   And then I end up moving things back out of the queue when mood or whimsy moves me.

But let's break this down a little farther, because there are lots of different aspects of my crafting life that I plan around.

• What do I want to knit (or crochet, or weave, or sew) next, soon, coming up, etc.?
• The Harry Potter Knit and Crochet House Cup -- how will I fit what I want to knit into the Cup's prompts?  How am I going to actually bust out 1000 or more points in a Term?  (I feel good about it this Term, people.  I'm focused.)   
• Yarn.  Yarn, you guys.  What do I want to make with the yarn I already have?  What do I want to make that I don't have yarn for?  (Shockingly, with as big as my stash is, occasionally I don't have the right thing in stock.)   I did a whole post on shopping for fiber festivals and how to plan for that back in 2015. 
• Gifts.  I like to knit.  I have friends and family who either love to receive hand-knits or who were foolish enough to pretend to love it in order to spare my feelings, and now we're trapped in this charade for eternity.

I wasn't kidding about liking stickers.

So those are (some) of the things I plan.  You'll no doubt have noticed an utter lack of mention of things like grocery shopping or housekeeping.   That should probably tell you where my priorities lie.  Carl and I do sit down and menu plan every week, but other than that we have just have some routines that bump along.  The whole thing needs more attention but, whatever, I'm busy knitting socks.

I do not have a perfect system.  I have an imperfect hodge-podge of systems, and I'm constantly looking to reinvent or tweak what I'm doing.   Part of the reason for these blog posts is to verbally process what I'm doing now (or what I want to be doing now) with an eye towards making decisions about how to proceed in 2019. 

Now, if you were to asking me about tracking (as opposed to planning)... well that would be a whole different blog post.

I Take A Lot of Pictures of Socks Next to Salsa

Somehow I managed to spend over three days without a pair of socks on the needles.   Mind you, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this (if by "reasonable" you mean "I was making decisions on what to knit based on how many invisible internet points I could get" ... and I do) but even so... it felt weird.

Don't worry though, I'm back in the game with some very festive holiday socks.

Not that holiday.  The other one.

I seem to take a lot of pictures of socks next to salsa.  One might draw some (likely accurate) conclusions from this.   Anyway, this is Must Stash Yarn's "Jack is Back," in their Merino/Nylon base.  I don't think they have any in stock right now, but there are some other great colorways available.

This was one of those very rare instances where I saw the yarn, I bought the yarn, I cast on the yarn.  Sort of a vidi, emi, kniti* situation.  Usually there's a year(s) long gap between steps 2 and 3.  Not this time, baby, it's October and I need me some spoopy socks.

I've named the project "I smell children," and I love how it is knitting up.

In other news, I've added a whack of new squares to my Hogwarts Studies Blanket (this is what I was doing instead of knitting a sock earlier this week).   For the second Quidditch Match of the term, our prompt was to knit or crochet something to protect from the cold.  I did ten tiny new squares and made the bold statement that they were one engorgio charm away from being big enough to cuddle up under.   (If none of that made any sense to you, the important takeaway is that I added squares to the sock yarn blanket.)

I'm closing in on 35% complete, if I keep to my original 12x18 plan.  I might do 12x24 instead, but I don't have to decide until I get there.   I'm getting tired of explaining every February how this both does and does not count as a WIP, so I'm going to try to accelerate my pace somewhat.   It might still be on the list for February 2019, but if so, there will be a lot more of it there.

*Made up Latin for "I saw, I bought, I knit."