Tag Archive | personal: goals

A Blog Post: New Year, New Goals

I’ve been thinking about goals, as one does at this time of year.

Yearly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals – the whole shebang.

Some of this comes from finishing up last year’s Wordcount spreadsheet and moving on to this year’s, but “wordcount” is, while a lot of fun, not a very important goal.

(okay, that’s not entirely true, ’cause if you-all want to read, say, Spoils, Purchase, and two other things every week, then a serial once/month and four other stories, a recipe and a partridge in a pear tree on Patreon and I want to write a novel and submit some stories, there needs to be a certain base wordcount.  That, by the way, turns out to be approximately 2000 words, 5 days a week.)

We did this seminar at work on “SMART” goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant/Realistic, and Time-Bounded (or something like that).

So when I’m setting goals – okay, I’ve tried for this for years but now I have a metric – I try to make them things that I can count and work towards.  Not “Sell 12 stories.”  That’s a) not my choice, b) not realistic and possibly not achievable, and c) not actually all that time-bounded.  But “Submit a story every other month.”

I’ve been trying to apply this to all aspects of my goal-setting, but when it comes, to, say, fun (someone suggested I have a section of goals for fun) I’m still sort of struggling.  The best I’ve come up with is “pick a day, and on that day every week, try to communicate with at least a couple of your distant friends.”  And also “do a trip that involves a museum.”

Those are not really uh, specific, but fun sort of gets wedged in the sides of things, doesn’t it?

I mean, other than uh.

When I spend three hours minecrafting and netflixing, which is… um.  It’s own problem?

Have I shown you my Minecraft railroad system?  It’s pretty amazing…

I know not everyone does or likes resolutions, but what about goals? How do you go about setting goals?

And, of course, also, how do you go about moving towards those goals?  Do you check in with yourself monthly? Daily? Never?  Do you bribe yourself? Punish yourself?

…Spend an hour playing Minecraft and THEN do your goals?

Burn all your goals down after a month and start again in March?

If I had a resolution in 2020, it would be Get Stuff Done.   I’m hoping that setting goals will help me get there.

How do YOU get stuff done?

New Year, New Goals, New Everything…

It’s a new year! It’s an arbitrary marker, of course, but I find I like arbitrary markers. I like resolutions. I like clean slates.

(This is starting to sound like the piece of fiction I wrote for January-by-the-numbers Day One).
I’m going to Do Things in 2017. Lots of things. Well, okay. I’m going to do a reasonable number of things.

I’m going to get my 365-day streak in 4theWords, because when you do that, you get fancy wings. I’m at 50-something now. I can do that.

Cal & I started our new project, so that’s a daily writing goal for me – which is conveniently just about a streak-making wordcount on 4thWords.

There’s other writing, of course: Edally and the novella thing, Patreon and all the little long-running stories here, the January By The Numbers posts (and so on and so on and so on and…)

I’m back on the weight-loss wagon, because I really want to do this. Which also means walking every day that I can stand to. T’s been looking at fountain pens (my 15-lbs goal) a lot lately, so that and my backsliding in Nov-December is really getting me geared up to do this, really do this.

Which means keeping track of everything, so hooray just starting a brand new bullet journal.

On pretty paper. With pretty pens, and banners, and all the whole shebang.

(tis a Mnemosyne, with very nice paper, a little smaller than I wanted but quite nice. Here’s a blurry picture).

I want to get the house tidy and keep it that way. I want to actually DO things in spring for the garden.

I want to work actively and consistently on the house.

I want to take a vacation, actually go somewhere. Probably the Adirondacks.

I think it’ll be a good year. I think I’m going to try for monthly goals rather than yearly, small, reachable mobile targets.

What about you? How’s your 2017 shaping up?

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Everyone Else is doing it: October Goals

1) Finish at least one project around the house.
2) Regularly empty the kitty litters
3) Equally regularly clean up the “snail trail” (as T. refers to it) of stuff left ’round the house (i.e., this morning it would be the charm box from my birthday-present charm)
4) Track food daily in myfitnesspal
5) get 30 minutes of exercise at least 3x/week.

Wish me luck!

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