Though I didn’t make any official New Year’s Resolutions, I  have been looking forward to the new year so that I can get into an actual work routine now that the wedding, home buying, major home renovations, and holidays are behind us. The last half of 2009 was crazy busy for us, and my work days have been pretty unstructured and abnormal for a while. I was putting in my requisite  hours at the part-time job, and then coming home and trying to get as much freelance work accomplished as possible in between the mortgage paperwork, or floor sanding, or unpacking boxes, or holiday preparation. I’m really glad it’s all behind us and I can rediscover what normal life is like.

To that end, I’ve come up with a new work plan that will allow me to stay on track and make the best use of my time so that I can meet my income goals for the year. It breaks down into:

• 5  hours a day at the part-time job
• 2 hours freelance web content management for mybiglife
• 3 articles (for any of 5 different clients, which include Demand Studios, New Hope Bariatrics, and Healthy Theory, a new client for whom I will be writing health and wellness articles)

With my new work plan, I can make $155 a day ($755 per week, or just over $40k a year), and I should be able to get it all done in 8-9 hours a day. And that’s not including any time I put in on weekends, or my occasional bookkeeping gig, which brings in about another $100 a month.

I’m pretty excited about having a plan in place, because my ultimate goal (once I have a little more debt paid off), is to become a certified holistic nutritionist. I’m looking into a program with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and the curriculum looks awesome. The 8-month program covers nutrition concepts, modern health issues, anatomy and physiology, health counseling, healthy eating and living, and professional practice. My dream is to do part-time nutritional counseling while continuing to write about health and wellness issues (and with a certification, I can command a higher rate and even write for magazines and other publications).  Though that’s all probably a couple of years away, I’m very excited about my new goals and really looking forward to learning more about health and nutrition. Until I can afford to enroll in the program, I’m devouring all the books I can by holistic nutrition and wellness experts like Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Mehmet Oz.  I’m also continuing to move my writing career more in this direction by finding new clients like Healthy  Theory, and focusing my Demand Studios efforts on health-related topics.

Last night mom & I went with some friends to the “Spiritual Comedy” presentation by Andy Dooley, who spoke about visualization and the law of attraction, so I’m pretty excited right now to putting some of these practices into place to make my goals a reality. It’s all stuff I’ve been reading and learning about for a few years now, but it always helps to have a refresher course!