Tracking down January

Freelancer life - not always a bed of roses

With a bold generous agenda set up in the last hours of 2017 ahead of me, both in my professional and personal life, I decided to keep an even stricter track of my goals, events and time management achievements and failures too. Tracking down... will hopefully be a regular presence on my blog, published on the first of every month and aimed at offering an overview of the previous month and some lessons learned. My hope is to be able to share inspiration with other people coping with the same issues or trying to improve their situation and find their own professional and personal path of life.

Blogging life

Blogging life was good in the last 31 days and promises to be even better, with a couple of sponsorships already done, and a couple of others in the making. I did maintain a permanent social media sharing and interaction, and things are growing up, although too slowly for my liking. The traffic is steady and, at least with BoiledWords, I am far beyond 100,000 views and growing which is a good thing after all. In terms of food experiences, I had only failures - including today therefore I am a bit behind with my recipe sharing. My waffle book and another two books that are almost done, but need a serious editing, were on hold, because...there is just no excuse for it anyway.

My bookish blog was by far the more active and more successful this month, with a couple of blog tours, interviews and new collaborations sealed for the next month at least.  

Interaction with other bloggers and influencers was a bit different for the better, but I am still not in the right place, I am trying at least. Not too hard, though. 

I finally learned how to make attractive Pinterest covers and I am really enjoying this newly creative tool. Better YouTube and SEO are next on my to-do-list. 

To be continued though, hopefully in a more steady direction, as I am not happy at all to swim over and over again in the same mud for a couple of months already, without any sparkle of change. I can probably keep doing what I am doing and being happy with it, but I am sure I can do even more.

Right now, I am reading Confident Digital Content by Adam Waters, and more such books are prepared for a crash learning course this weekend so maybe I can change something in the right direction. 

Freelancing

January started a bit slowly in terms of freelance work, but I had at least two projects to achieve per week in the last three weeks. 

In order to keep a good track of my income from freelancing, I was finally able to create an Excel which covers the income both from blogging and freelancing. The frustrating part is that there are projects done and paid later - if ever, and this could create at least for a while a serious financial disbalance. When you have bills to pay, you need to have a permanent flow of money happily jumping in your account and the aim is too really create this best case scenario. I am not even half through achieving it, though. 

In terms of the content of my freelance work, I did mostly translations, which I am doing for already a couple of years, but which is not my favorite professional domain. Editing and writing are always my no.1, with photography and online teaching coming next, but because too lenient to do some research and pitch my ideas, I keep doing it. 

Time management

Since my school years, I am very strict in terms of time management, tracking down obsessively my schedule and trying to be as busy as possible. With one single exception of a couple of days, I kept being very busy in January, with only a couple of days when I was really lagging behind. Those days paid high too, as there were supposed to be spent chasing blogging and freelancing opportunities. 

My aim for a couple of days is to get the best of each day and hour, and most of the time I am doing it, but once in a while I am too tired or really need a healthy procrastination hour before doing anything. And this time never comes back. 

Personal life

Personally, things were with ups and downs too. Maybe this is life, but I am sure some improvements can be done. Baby improved significantly his speaking abilities therefore I am more relieved and stress free when it comes to his development. An appointment by the pediatrician is in the cards the next week when I will get probably the best advice, as usual, about the next steps to be done.

Baby kept being my priority for the last days, with a lot of efforts being done towards securing a place for a kindergarten at least from September this year. Apparently, there is much easier to be accepted to Harvard than to find a place to a decent Berlin kindergarten and the struggle is real. 

I've spent also some great times with my friends having lunches out but reclaiming me time was sometimes almost impossible, so all I was able to do was to take some extra hour of sleep.

The relationship with people that I have to deal with, although they only create discomfort and tensions was smooth and I am finally able to ignore their negativity. As for the negativity of people that are actually close to me, this was very hard to deal with, and keeping them and their thoughts at bay was quite a hard, difficult and almost impossible mission. 

Some good modest things happened too, such as the fact that I was finally able to have a general dentist check-up and another general medical more awaited check-up. I also started to gather information about the best driving licence schools around me, which will finally pave the way for me being able to drive. 

I am also looking forward to learning new skills online, and registered for some free classes on Coursera, but I keep being distracted by other things going on around me and every evening ends up with me being unable to switch on to the learning. However, my German exercises went smoothly, with at least one hour of practice - which included also reading and writing - every day. 

Overview. What's next

To be very honest, I am 75% unhappy with the current situation, but in a very positive way which creates a healthy pressure to finally make those much awaited and well-deserved changes in my both personal and professional life. I know I can do more and I will definitely work hard towards it, with a better time management and better determination. 

Let's hope that February will bring it on more positive changes and improvement in everyone's life. I, personally, can't wait to let them happen and share them here.

Time to Switch to the Autumn Routine

Spring and summer are my favorite seasons of the year. Starting with the beginnig of March, I feel an air of change and optimism into my life that keeps me company until late September. It is that time of the year when I sleep with the window open, and I love to wake up a little bit late as I spent the evening outdoors, under the carpet of shining stars.

Unfortunately, since moving to Germany, I had to get used with rather cold summer days, coping with unexpected and undesirable rains. I am more than happy with my life here and I easily accomodated with the bureaucracy and even the language, but ten years into my journey and I am still experiencing heartache when I see how a beautiful summer day is ruined by heavy winds and cold rains. However, I realized that little by little I am getting used with the temperatures and there are the ones I used to love - hot 40C summer days - aren't pleasant any more. The last winter I was even able to survive without complaining every singly day that the temperatures don't allow me to leave the house. Sometimes, we need to realize that we are in fact more adaptable then we might think we are. 

In time, I've learned the lessons of different season and short days, which start in September for a long amount of months. I wanted to learn how to better manage my long winters time, because my aim is to make the best of my short life, and following a strict schedule is part of my daily life plan. In the last days, with lower temperatures welcoming me in the morning, and an always earlier hour to start the dark hours, I realize that I should also change something in my daily routine.

Therefore, here are my plans for the next 3 months or so:

- Waking up early, preferably around 6.45 to be able to finish my writing assignments, preferably before the baby wakes up. I realized that I always feel better energized when I have written and published my posts in the morning so, it is a good incentive to have a positive outlook of the day.

- More focus on home cooking, also because I feel that in the summer the temptation is rather to eat out and I still have a lot of cooking and backing skills to improve.

- Keep up with my minimum 60 minutes of walking every day, preferably in the first half of the day or shortly after 14.00.

- Spending at least one hour the day social networking. As a stay-at-home, single freelancing mother, such activities are very important to balance the weight of home-bonding. 

- Spending the evening reading and updating social media channels.

- Never forget that I have to learn each day something new, either improving and learning a new language, or new skills, or writing a challenging book review, or cooking something new, or tasting a new food or ingredient. The list is infinite and it is one of my favorite challenge so far.

I also set up a list of very interesting posts coming up on the blog, so stay tunned for a lot of autumn and winter awesomeness coming up!

Until then,

Happy holidays!

Food52: A New Way to Dinner

I am a big admirer of the Food52  network, for the way in which makes every step of the kitchen management and any recipe achievement just a matter of time. For someone like me, growing up with the deep feeling that I will never be able to bake or cook anything but fried eggs, it is an invaluable incentive that helped me to go through the challenges of managing almost successfully a house with children and regular hungry guests. 

The founders of the website, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, kept up helping lost-in-the kitchen people like me. A New Way to Dinner aims at offering first-hand and long tested assistance to busy family - of four - for managing the chores and challenges of having every day something new, healthy and tasty on the plate. Scheduled as one-week seasonal menus, with ingredients that can be easily switched and combined to create new dishes, the recipes suggested are easy to make and require a minimal time investment. In addition, you are promised to save money on groceries and waste less food, improve the shopping and cooking habits. Sounds delish, isnt't it? The aim: 'Gone will be that nagging to-do anxiety about what you'll put together for dinner after work'. 

You are offered a weekly plan, with details about the time you need to spend in various days for cutting or cleaning the veggies or for the cooking per se. You have reheating directions, advice about how to store the veggies or meat, what kind of storage containers you need. 

The menus are meat-based, but most probably not impossible to substitute them with meatless variants.  Although the portions are aimed for a family of four, with a but of flexibility and imagination, the recipes can be extended or restrained for bigger or smaller households. 

As I am an instant lover of everything that aims to better organize and manage the time, I loved the book even more. However, there are also some of the recipes that I have in sight for the next days, so expect soon to read about applesauce cake with caramel icing, meatballs with onions and zucchini or watermelon puree. 

Strongly recommended to anyone interested in tasty dinners with a minimal time and financial investment.

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review