Coming down off the holidays, I'm saying I'm going to eat better, but I still have some Christmas pecans I need to make. Standing in the kitchen, I'm thinking of recipes and how they work for any part of life, not just baking or cooking.

For instance, the brownies I'm famous for came from a recipe my sister made years ago that I really liked. Over several years, I kept tweaking the recipe to make it exactly the way I wanted, but it still contained the same foundational elements. And it was so much easier to get to my amazing brownie recipe having started with a foundation than to muddle around trying to figure out how much sugar, how much cocoa, how much flour, etc. was the right amount.

This idea of a foundational recipe can work for goal setting or time management or project management or even writing a book! Looking at your plans for the year as a recipe or a foundation may help give you a change in perspective and some ah-ha moments.

You can try a few different people's plan for marketing or writing a book or time management, or you can just find one, follow it, tweak it, and be done. Following too many people can lead to confusion and overwhelm and defeat the purpose of looking for help. But forcing yourself to keep doing something a certain way after you've seen that it doesn't work for you, well, that doesn't help you much either.

If you'd like to try my foundational recipe for time and project management, my class Going the Distance: Time and Project Management for Writers starts again on Monday, January 15, 2018. Registration will stay open through Wednesday, January 17. And on Saturday, January 20, I'll be adding a new element to the class. We'll have a live online 4-hour class where we'll work together to decide on our goals, break them down into smaller pieces, and plan them out on our calendars.

Listen to Mark Dawson's Self Publishing Formula Podcast, episode 100, from Friday, January 5, 2018, and download the free PDF tip sheet to get a $50 off coupon for my class.