• They’re in Albion Park Rail! This means I can drive there in 25 minutes. BIG DEAL, since my last job had me catching a train for 90-100 minutes, then hiking to Glebe from Central station.
• They sell tangible products! Not NLP which I find highly dubious.
• I get to be part of a team, instead of having everything IT resting on my shoulders so I feel like I’m constantly under massive amounts of pressure.
• I’m treated with respect. That’s a key thing that seemed to be lacking before.
• I’m making about the same as before, only I don’t have to spend $57 a week on a train ticket. It’s closer to $25 a week in petrol. Oh and I get more perks because I’m an employee instead of a contractor… and they’re already deducting tax, so I won’t have a nasty surprise at the end of this financial year!

OK, so what else do I have to report? Well, what don’t I?

God knows how many goals I’ve achieved. I’ll have to do a full rundown in another post as this one will get too long.

I’ve done tons of drawing with my Wacom Cintiq (have I blogged about that yet??). It’s made it SO EASY to make cool looking drawings. I love it to bits. Look in the sidebar on the right to see a few links to images I’ve created with it.

A couple of days ago I registered the domain www.atherandearth.com. This is where my comic will live. I am still working on it, but I’m confident I’ll be able to start getting things done with it once NaNoWriMo this year is over.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I will be participating again in one month’s time. It will be AWESOME. I already have a fully developed plot!

Site Flight Web Design is over. I just never could get the hang of running a business. Don’t worry though, I’m not sad about it. It’s just me, I’m not cut out to be self-employed. Not enough motivation for things like that. It’s a problem I’ve had since I was about 10. Started out as a distaste for homework. Now it’s a distaste for doing things for other people while I’m at home. It feels like my personal space is being crushed, I guess. I’m happy to work while at a workplace, but I just can’t take that work home with me. Hence why I couldn’t handle working from home.

So it’s been a funny old ride, this year. It started out with me as enormously cashed up, buying cameras and expensive graphics tablets, leaving my Woolworths job, moving house, working in Sydney, ending each day feeling more drained of my sanity than the day before… then, I was unemployed, enjoying all the sudden free time but feeling lazy and sluggish and kind of doing that thing that George Costanza in Seinfeld did during the “Summer of George” – spending all my time “decompressing” by sitting idly. It got to the point where my sister tried making me do things by giving me lists because she was so upset that I seemed to be doing nothing. But I found my way.

I applied for a fateful job in late August, I got an interview, and the following Wednesday I was offered the job. I was nervous on my first day, and a bit spooked by the whole ordeal in the first few hours, where I had a whole lot of tasks bounced off me, and I was left worried about what I’d got myself into. But now that I’ve settled in, I’ve learnt that these things are doable and it seems like I’m appreciated in that workplace.

Because of my unemployment coinciding with my car needing a bunch done to it, I’m still in a bit of debt, but my job will take care of that within this month, and that’ll be a big weight off my shoulders.

Thanks to working close by, I will be able to not only join the gym next to my workplace and work out every day, but also work on my comic AND do NaNoWriMo without any problems.

This is it! This is the point in my life where everything works for me!

Noooooo!!!!!

It’s so much work! There is so much to know! There is so much to do in such a short period of time! This course, Certificate IV in Small Business Management, is not supposed to go for like a month. It’s supposed to go for a year!

Just these past two days have been… the definition of “crash course”. I’ve come home on both days feeling like I want to go right to bed. And yet, I can’t, because I have homework to do!!

From what the past two days have taught me, I have to:

• Do a metric tonne of research including surveys, statistic tracking, reading, talking to people and studying competition
• Register my business name
• Make sure my home has Public Liability insurance
• Write an extensive Business Plan on which I will be judged on the 17th of February, along with copies of things including insurance, driver’s licence, ABN and BRN.
• Work out pricing
• Choose a host and domain registrar sooner rather than later (like, before the 6th of February)
• Make sure my website is up and running soon!

Who knows what further bombs will be unloaded on us… though I feel like it may include marketing and whatnot.

Oh man. Freaking out.

I am very proud of it. I created it with the free illustration software Inkscape.

The most important things I need to do from here include:

• Register business name
• Get ABN
• Storyboard the website
• Create the web packages/templates
• Work out pricing
• Purchase domain and hosting (Servage, as well as being susceptible to hacking, does not offer .com.au domains)
• Make the website

And that’s not even taking into consideration the actual business side of things. Guh.

That was probably a mistake. You see, I work so much better when I have self-set goals. It worked when I was losing weight, it worked during many web sites I worked on in the past, and recently it’s worked like a charm for NaNoWriMo.

It doesn’t work well when someone is cracking a whip. That’s why I was so slack with homework in high school. I can’t stand people trying to control me. So, I kind of act passive aggressive and either do a bad job, or I don’t do it at all. Now, this is different at work, because I want money and I know that I need to do things to have money. But when there is no tangible and impending motivational factor, such as being at school or TAFE, I just slack off and do what I feel like. Procrastination to its extreme.

When I have my own goals, my own motivation and my own rewards, that’s when I do work. And hell, I enjoy it too.

So that’s why I’m making a to-do list on Remember the Milk.