I’m an avid listener of podcasts (and I even make one with my wife) and one of my favorite shows, Cortex, had its annual Yearly Themes episode. I’ve always enjoyed these episodes in particular because I like hearing about how different people work and what drives their focus. Both of the hosts are self-employed and often share their experiences with work before and after being self-employed. As part of that, they each select a theme to guide them for the following year.
I really like the idea and this year I am going to take a serious stab at a yearly theme and use it to guide what I do. After much consideration, my yearly theme is that of production. Over the past several years I have created a great deal of content for my students and for places like YouTube and Udemy. I truly enjoy making content and feel happiest when I’m able to create something that I poured time, energy, and consideration into and have a final product that I’m proud of.
The Year of Production for me means that I want to continue to produce items but at more consistent paces and with higher quality. I have four areas that I want to focus my production on:
1. My Website
The first thing I want to spend some serious time
2. YouTube
As I mentioned above, I really like creating things. The thing that I like to make the most is video content. I posted my first video on my current channel at the beginning of the 2016-2018 school year. Through that time a few of my videos have gotten tens of thousands of views and allowed me to connect to different communities. I really like that. In 2018, my videos generated roughly 2,600 of watch time. I’m super impressed by that and I really hope to grow my video offerings. I’m not really looking to become YouTube famous or make money or anything like that, I just like creating and sharing video content.
My goal is to produce at least 50 YouTube videos by the end of 2019. For reference I posted 26 videos last year.
3. Udemy
Being a teacher and enjoying video production, I teach several online classes through Udemy. I currently teach about 10,000 students from 142 different countries. I produced two courses last year and started the planning on several others, but never completed them. My goal for 2019 is to create three new courses and generate an average of $250 in monthly income from my course sales.
4. Budget Couple
My wife and I have been creating a podcast for the past year an a half and last year saw a 248% increase in average monthly downloads to the year prior. I would like to continue to produce our podcast every other week and grow our audience. I would also like to branch out a bit and produce a few free ebooks and other materials to help people with their budgeting. I would also like to look at the possibility of creating a course with my wife but I need to get her on board with that first.
Final Thoughts
So there it is, my outline to help guide my free time for the year. I have other goals both professional and personal that I may write about in the future but this is where I want to begin to focus my time. What’s your yearly theme?
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