It probably is a sign of ill omen that during the first bits of free, discretionary time I had in the New Year, I developed a nasty head cold that sapped all my energy and drive. It’s taken a few days to get over it. Which might have been good, I guess, as I needed a bit more time to figure out what I wanted to try and make 2026.
As a general concept, I’ve known what the general thrust is going to be. “More, but better.” The tail end of 2025 had a lot of changes in my life. I’m doing comics more, I’m going to the gym, I have a job I love. I just need to keep at the things that are awesome and handle my free time a bit better. And I’ve thought about all sorts of goals that I could set. What accomplishments do I want to try and do this year? Especially when I know that it’s not easy to return to your goals and keep them moving (I have NOT forgot about my 2/5/10 year plans that I made last year. I just haven’t gone back to review them at all.)
After a lot of options explored and a bit of math, I’ve decided to do a pretty simple plan for the year; I want to spend 1,000 hours doing the things that feel like the person I want to be. I’ve broken that into 10 groups of 100 hours a piece. Or 2 hours a week for each item. Achievable, right? 20 hours or so a week, but since I’m tracking for the year, I can shift focus as passions take me and time permits. I’ve installed a time billing app, and we’ll see how well this works for me. Let’s go over my categories.
1. Exercise
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m trying to work out and get healthier. I’m still working on low hanging fruit, but 2 hours a week is very doable, and probably will be effective. My normal pre-work workout is about 40 minutes, so that’s 3 times a week unless I go the literal extra mile. Achievable, doctor recommended, and I think it will work well for me.
2. Read Fiction
I read a lot, but it’s often this unsatisfying micro-fiction of webnovel updates. Not to bash that, but a lot of what I read is written to keep people on the line, not to tell a good story. So sitting and conciously reading a book every so often will be good for me. I’m okay with this being comics, novels, stuff I’ve read before or not. But the one caveat I’m tossing on this is that I want to do it analog. I have no reason for that rule, other than to make it different from my casual checking of my stories.
3. Read ‘Non’-Fiction
Related, I will easily turn to some sort of story. But there’s other things out there. This might be poetry, self-help, even bibliographies. It could also be books about science, history, whatever. You now what nonfiction is. My definition is going to be very broad for this, but I want to try and grow my horizons a bit, as a way to prime the pump beyond the stories I read.
4. CultureQuest Returns
If you’ve been following my stuff for years, you’ll remember an old project called CultureQuest, which is about reading and watching things of “culture”. What does that mean? idk, that’s the Quest part of the name. But I want to see if I can’t watch stuff I normally wouldn’t, things that are highly lauded or have won awards. And watch them with focus, not just casually. There might be a bit of writing involved after. We’ll see.
5. Writing
Since I mentioned it, let’s hit up that item. I need to write more. Things like this bog/article/newsletter count, as would writing actual fiction. Trying to get better about having my thoughts hit the page is what it’s all about.
6. Gamewriting
In a slightly different vein, I want to spend time working on my RPG system I’m writing. I think it’s got a lot of cool things, and I think I can go far. But it won’t do that until I actually put in the work. What’s the point of priming the pump if I don’t actually do something with what I’ve gathered?
7. D&D Prep
One of my biggest weaknesses is my reliance on improvization. I don’t do nearly enough legwork before the game. And I don’t like that about myself. I can do better, and I want to do better. This is me spending time getting better.
8. Art
Speaking of getting better, I want to spend time developing art skills. I don’t really know what this looks like. I do know that i don’t want to count watching videos. Actual creation time is what will get counted. It’s too easy for watching a video to feel like useful progress, but it doesn’t actually lend itself to skills.
9. Comics
This is actually a special item on the list, because it’s on there twice. Or double or something. Two doses of comics in my week, twice the time dedicated to the craft. I debated if I wanted this item to be projects that weren’t Bearded Bargains, or if I should include the weakly comic somehow, and just settled on lumping it all together with more time. Bearded Bargains is not the end-all be-all of my comicking, so I want to have space for other things, but if I need to highlight that story for that week, I can. I have some BB projects that are larger than just 4 panels a week.
Resolution
Things will probably flow together a bit. I can certainly imagine drawing things as Art for other projects. Will I double dip the time? No idea. The time app I’ve installed seems to let me focus on one thing, and I have 33 minutes of writing this already.
With my general time system set up and explained, let me mention a few projects and other goals that I’d love to hit this year.
- Matt’s Mind Monthly – I was really bad about getting these done weekly, but monthly might be doable. Comic Lab has talked up newsletters, and that’s sort of what this is. Sign up on Patreon to get it sent to your email, along with everything else I do and post there.
- Patreon increase – I’ve been posting about 1 thing a week on Patreon. I’d love to have more value there. Part of that is to make my previous comic runs available to Patrons as PDF downloads that can also be sold using Patreon as the E-Store.
- Other Comic Projects
- Rachael in Gameland – My intention a while ago was to start regularly posting the next chapter in 2026. But I’ve done so little work on it since that it’s not ready for me to start posting any time soon. So, getting that good to go would be great.
- Unnamed Pixie Project – I recently started on a Minecraft Server that has some elements of Roleplay as part of the fun. 3ish years ago, I had been part of a modded server called “Witchcraft” or something like that. The Discord is gone, afaict. Anyway, as I reached the end of that server’s life, I lamented that I hadn’t just started making my lore happen. So when this opportunity arose, I decided to jump into it with both feet, and that includes the lore comics I want to make.
- TG Sagas – Man, I have such a hard to describe relationship with this project. But I’m still there, hoping to be part of the rekindling that I think could happen any day. I don’t know what I want out of a group, which makes it hard to start my own group for this sort of thing.
- Youtube things – As I assembled my list of numbers at the end of 2025, I included my Youtube numbers. It one of the 2 social media platforms I use, and I probably ought to do more with it. Making comics into shorts is a thing I’ve considered, but I’ve not dedicated the time to actually doing.
- The Ballon Factory – My discord group about making comics. I need to decide what sort of advertising I want to do with it, and see if it should be more or if its fine being small. idk, but its something I’m doing online that I should keep in mind.
I think that’s all I have right now. I’m sure that there’s more that I could be doing, but this feels like enough for now.
Looking at my 2/5/10 plans, I feel good about this list of foci. Most things in general lead towards my side-gig financial security hope, and the gym leads me towards the other part of the 2 year plan. the book goals are built on with the writing and the game writing. I think this year will be helpful for my ongoing big goals. and everything working together will make it easier to do. That’s the goal.
I’ll include my hours with the February post. I’ll try not to make it the focus, but no promises.
Ciao!