Recently my wife and I were able to sit in on a personal finance course. These courses are organized through our church and run by volunteers. In this particular session, the discussion focused on goal setting, and an interesting thought was shared. One of the members of the group mentioned having a goal to go to the gym each morning. Now at the onset that sounds like a great goal. You can keep fit, you gain discipline, and it’s a great way to start your day, but the longer I thought about it the more I realized it was a horrible goal.
Why so bad? It’s simply too hard to accomplish. Can you imagine having to complete a task daily as a goal for the rest of your life? If you mess up once, you’ve failed. If you don’t make it to the gym for any reason you’re now left making excuses for yourself as to why it doesn’t count against your goal. This sparked a whole new idea in my head that related directly to my own goals as a writer.
For a while there I was setting goals to write daily. I felt like by committing to writing every day I would be able to accomplish my overall goal of completing my book and publishing it. The problem I was always facing is I’d have legitimate reasons for not being able to write, but the failure of writing took me down a deep slope of hopelessness until I finally picked myself back up and set a new goal.
Failure is hard and setting a daily goal to write and constantly failing and re-failing on that goal was exhausting. When I listened to this person describe what their goals were to what they are I realized writing daily wasn’t a goal at all, it was a task I needed to complete to achieve my goal. How does that change anything? By making writing a task suddenly I’m no longer a failure when I don’t write. Instead of spending weeks to months being stumped because of that one day I decided I wanted to do something besides write, I feel invigorated by the idea I can fill my time with whatever I need to help me achieve my overall goal.
Not all people’s brains work like mine. Some people work perfectly well under a strict daily goal. Even with this method, I think it’s smart to keep short-term goals right alongside those long-term goals. For now, I’ll focus on setting a weekly goal. At this point, I’m just trying to properly title my actions. By labeling my daily writing as a task to complete I know it will just get more challenging to keep my goal if I fail to complete it, rather than failing to achieve my goal. I find I often make the switch anyway after setting the goal, but I’m affected more deeply when I haven’t defined it from the beginning.
Jacob Gittins 