20 for 2020: week 18

My 20 for 2020 list.

I signed up for a new Photoshop course during the week. It’s by one of the instructors of the other course I’m doing (thing 7) and when I got the email advertising the course at a massive discount I thought for ages about whether I should sign up for another course when I hadn’t made much progress with the one I was already doing (and not making much progress on). But the special deal and super discounted price were sweet and I am a sucker for signing up to pushy emails that try to sell me courses, so here I am.

I did do a bit of research and I asked them about whether there would be much overlap between this course and the one I’m already doing. There isn’t, and their answer is what really convinced me to do it, which is that this is more of a Photoshop course and it covers a lot of the basic elements of the app that I don’t know much about and have been using with only a vague idea of what I’m doing and get frustrated when they don’t work properly. I think this course will give me more of what I need right now and it will give me some of the foundations I need to do the course I was originally planning on doing, which covers some elements of photography as well as Photoshop. I’ve started work on the first module and have learned (and applied) a lot already. One of the first lessons was about setting up a graphics tablet and I learned a couple of new things about my tablet (thing 17), which was a bonus.

As a result of starting this course, I decided to change my 20 for 2020 list slightly and make this new course thing 7 on my list. Of course, there’s no reason why I can’t complete both of them this year, and that would be brilliant. But looking at the uni work (thing 8) for the next two and a bit months, and then the final unit after that, I can’t see me having a lot of time to devote to these courses until the middle of October when uni finishes. So I am just aiming to get one course done, or as much of it as I can, this year. I think this will require some better time management and scheduling than I currently have, and I will need to go back and finish the Indistractable work (thing 13) so that I can become more focused.

Unit 3 of my uni course officially started on Monday and the first assignment is due in two weeks. No pressure! After a full-on unit last time and with all the odd things going on at the moment, I’m finding it really hard to muster any enthusiasm for it at all. I’ve been enjoying the extra free time to work on my creative projects and I feel like I’m making progress there. So I need to get my head around this. It does seem like it will be relevant to my work and will have things we can apply at work throughout the unit but the thought of starting a new unit, with new materials and a big reading pile, is not filling me with joy right now and I’ve only started one of the readings.

I continued to work on the journalling for the wellbeing course (thing 3) and am finding the overlaps between this and some of my personal development work from the previous uni module really useful. Some of it also links to the Indistractable work.

I’ve been reading in bed every night (thing 14). I never used to like to read in bed so I didn’t think this was a good time to do it but now I’m going to bed earlier than I used to, I’m not quite as tired and reading puts me more in the mood to sleep than before, when I’d just crash as soon as I got into bed.

Sunday was my allocated day for doing my monthly review of my Unravel Your Year workbook (thing 22). Sitting at home in my room with a takeaway coffee isn’t quite the same as sitting in my local coffee shop first thing in the morning, but these are the times I’m living in and I’m glad the coffee shop is close enough for me to be able to do this. It was still nice to reflect on what I learned last month and to clarify what I want to focus on this month. Now I just have to get myself to work on that uni assignment!

Summary for the week

• Things completed this week: 0
• Things completed to date: 8 (1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 15, 16, 18)
• Things I progressed: 6 (3, 7, 8, 14, 17, 22)
• Things in progress I didn’t progress: 2 (11, 13)
• Things not started: 6 (2, 9, 12, 19, 20, 21)
• Days I stuck to my 15 minutes creative habit this week: 7
• Days I read a book: 7