Today is day 1 of my 30 day blog challenge.

One of the biggest challenges to being self-employed is motivation. Often, when I tell people I work for myself, they respond with “Oh, I could never do that. I need more structure.”  Well, to be honest, there are days when I need it, too. There are days when I take a slight detour to read current events and then…hours have gone by. Nothing accomplished, except that I’m really caught up on current events and the weather.

After two-and-a-half years of living in Costa Rica, we moved back to the United States in December. After crying for a couple o days about the cold, there was a lot of activity to keep me busy when we first arrived:  Christmas, buying a car, moving to Kansas City, enrolling kids young and old in school, scheduling activities, setting up doctors appointments, transporting said kids around, settling in to our new place.

But the flurry of activity from moving is over. The dust has settled, and here I am again, faced with a blank screen and endless possibilities. Endless possibilities: my greatest desire and my greatest weakness all at the same time. How do you make endless possibilities work for you, and not against you? Did you say something about focus? Did you say something about priorities? Yes yes, I know, but creatives sometimes have a problem with this so…

To provide myself with some needed internal structure and focus and climb out of my rut, I’m going to publicly challenge myself to get busy. Starting today, and for the following 29 days, I will write and publish a blog post. I will cover online marketing, some lessons from Costa Rica, what it’s like to move back home after being away for a while (I still whine and cry about the cold), how my husband and I deal with working together,  or how I tackle endless possibilities one task at a time. Hopefully.

I’m going to be trying some different methods for getting stuff done, and I’ll let you know how that goes, too. Have some good suggestions for getting on the motivation train? I’m all ears!

PS: My favorite “getting it done” quote is from the Cult of Done Manifesto from Bre Pettis: LAUGH AT PERFECTION. IT’S BORING AND KEEPS YOU FROM BEING DONE.

PPS: I just had to reread the manifesto again in it’s entirety. I forgot how much I loved it!

About the Author: Hollie Niblett is the owner, project manager and content strategist at Maya Creative Group. She has been in the business of online publications, sales and marketing since 2009, after spending many years managing programs and working with at-risk youth for non-profit and government agencies. She is a native Okie currently living in Kansas City with her husband and daughter.