Goals
Well, I said at the beginning of the month that I had ambitious goals, and yes, they were ambitious, and they failed miserably. This makes me sad. Sure there were reasons, excuses, excuses, blah blah.
Course, if this had been my day job, perhaps I would have gotten fired. Those excuses don’t fly in the day job.
Rather apropos, though, was today’s blog post from the awesome Creative Penn blog: Mid Year Writing Goal Review and Challenge. This is an excellent blog post that I’m taking a lot from. Especially:
Break those goals down into achievable mini-goals as per the diagram above. For example, if you are going to write your book before Jan 1 2010 (and that is achievable), then you need to write 1 chapter every 2 weeks until then.
I also have too much going on, which is why I spent most of this week trying to catch up on things I owed other people. Once I got those things off my plate, I can start focusing on my own projects. I don’t know what August will bring, with DragonCon, WorldCon, and hopefully Heaven edits. But currently I have goals and I have to work on them. Rar.
Writing prompt (remember those?) for July 31: There’s a fire in the Crazy Cat Lady’s (TM) house.
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Arioch | Jul 31, 2009 | Reply
Sounds very similar to what I learned when I was in officer training for firefighting. Kind of strange how some things cross over into nearly all aspects of life
Breaking large goals down into smaller pieces is essential towards achieving your final objective. It also helps if you are able to look at them with an objective (rather than subjective) means of measuring whether you have succeeded in achieving them or not.
If you fail one day, bump that goal to the next day. Don’t try to do two days at once or you are setting yourself up to fail. Life is going to throw you curves sometimes. Try to allow for a few of those when you lay out your long term timeline and you’ll be fine. It’s easy to get focused off in the distance and screw the pooch short term. If you keep your eyes on what you’re doing, you wind up being done before you know it. Sounds odd, but it works for me.
Joanna Penn | Jul 31, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for the shout out Mur! You achieve so many goals regularly – you are a writing machine! (and an inspiration to us lesser mortals!)
I am already focussing on NaNoWriMo as a time when I will get a massive chunk of my first fiction novel done. A daunting task after so much non-fiction! But you have to get that first one out of the way don’t you!
Happy Goal Achieving Day!
Joanna
Elizabeth | Aug 1, 2009 | Reply
Sometimes you just have a bad goals month. I did a couple of months ago when I tried to do too much at once and failed on pretty much all of them. Since then I’ve simplified and focused on the most important ones.
But the main thing is to have goals. Even if you fail on them sometimes the fact you have them at all makes you more likely to achieve those things than someone who doesn’t set down those goals.
Robert Grant | Aug 2, 2009 | Reply
Wotcha
I was once told, in no uncertain terms, that if you tell me *before*, it’s a reason, if you tell me *after*, it’s an excuse. It hurt at the time (I was young and I looked-up to this guy) but I’ve always remembered it so, if you tell us why you’re going to miss your target beforehand we’ll treat it as a reason and cut you some slack, but if you fail miserably and tell us afterwards then it’s just an excuse and…..well, if you don’t actually get your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard then it doesn’t matter how you re-organise your goals, you still won’t hit them.
Hey I’m not having a go, I’m as lousy as anyone at actually doing the work, but I recognise that spending time re-organising my goals – again – is time I should be using trying to reach the original one….by writing.
Cool blog though.
Cheers!
Rob
Mur Lafferty | Aug 4, 2009 | Reply
Rob- I did say so before – I said it in the podcast.