Ever-Changing Goals
Nov. 14th, 2013 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spryngNovember is creeping along. The year is closing itself up and I'm looking at my list of goals for this year and dreaming up ways to complete them - or not. I have a tendency to set goals and then reprioritize things as they come up. I've grown to be okay with this. Especially when often the goals mutate the more I learn about myself, what I want, and what I can do.
I had a set of strength goals I wanted to achieve by the end of this year and I think I'll miss all but one of them. I'm okay with this because instead I've decided to focus on just the act of strength training itself, instead of any specific weights. I was becoming frustrated with apparent lack of progress, though, and the weight goals I had set were seeming further and further away. So instead I dropped everything and decided to try just focusing on the training itself, week by week. I found myself a steady program - 10 weeks with only the expectation that you will add weight if and when you can - and decided to commit to it.
No end goal - just ten weeks of work. Coincidentally, it ends on the last week of the year. At which point I'll evaluate how it went and go again, or adjust accordingly. We'll see, I keep saying to myself. We'll see.
I've decided to take the same approach to writing. I wrote myself silly over the last two months, hitting and going well beyond 1k/day to complete the GW rewrite. It worked really well, at least in establishing a daily writing habit I can fit into my breaks and lunches. Now I want to expand that to a true daily habit, because I've been woefully inept at implementing it on the weekends. But instead on focusing on an amount, I'm just going to focus on showing up. Which should work better for the kind of work I need to focus on now - querying and writing this horrible, terrible, no good, very bad synopsis. It's difficult to put a word count on something that is constantly in flux - being snipped and edited and added to and snipped again. So I just didn't touch it. But now that excuse should be gone and maybe I can finally make some headway on that monster.
Ugh, synopses.
And again, I'll look at how this goes for me come January, when I'm sure I'll have to reevaluate and revision my goals all over again.
I had a set of strength goals I wanted to achieve by the end of this year and I think I'll miss all but one of them. I'm okay with this because instead I've decided to focus on just the act of strength training itself, instead of any specific weights. I was becoming frustrated with apparent lack of progress, though, and the weight goals I had set were seeming further and further away. So instead I dropped everything and decided to try just focusing on the training itself, week by week. I found myself a steady program - 10 weeks with only the expectation that you will add weight if and when you can - and decided to commit to it.
No end goal - just ten weeks of work. Coincidentally, it ends on the last week of the year. At which point I'll evaluate how it went and go again, or adjust accordingly. We'll see, I keep saying to myself. We'll see.
I've decided to take the same approach to writing. I wrote myself silly over the last two months, hitting and going well beyond 1k/day to complete the GW rewrite. It worked really well, at least in establishing a daily writing habit I can fit into my breaks and lunches. Now I want to expand that to a true daily habit, because I've been woefully inept at implementing it on the weekends. But instead on focusing on an amount, I'm just going to focus on showing up. Which should work better for the kind of work I need to focus on now - querying and writing this horrible, terrible, no good, very bad synopsis. It's difficult to put a word count on something that is constantly in flux - being snipped and edited and added to and snipped again. So I just didn't touch it. But now that excuse should be gone and maybe I can finally make some headway on that monster.
Ugh, synopses.
And again, I'll look at how this goes for me come January, when I'm sure I'll have to reevaluate and revision my goals all over again.
