Sneak Up On Your Dreams

Often the problem with attaining goals is not thinking them up or even doing the tasks necessary to achieve them, it’s finding the time and energy to do the necessary tasks.  Just about everyone has to work hard to maintain their basic standard of living. Everyone has to earn enough money to live, while also taking care of all their other responsibilities.

After a long day teaching at the high school, I would arrive home drained. I had just spent seven hours jousting with teenage attitudes and defiance, designing curriculum then presenting lessons to the my classes in the most interesting and engaging way that I could.  I felt like a juggler up on a ball.  When I arrived home I had my two kindergarten sons to take care of as well as a part-time job teaching college online.  The boys had just had a long exhausting day at school, where they had to follow all the rules and behave well. By the time they arrived home they had (as my friend explained it) “used up all their good.”  They wanted to kick up a ruckus when they got home.  I didn’t have much ruckus-kicking prevention energy left.  In addition, I had to cook dinner and get everything ready to do it all again the next day. I certainly didn’t have much energy left for extra activities.

The problem, though, is that I wanted a different life in the future. For that, I knew I would have to add some tasks to my day.  When I first began working on my goals they weren’t all that clear.  I knew I wanted to try to be a writer, but it seemed like a distant, nebulous goal for the future.

Part o f sneaking up on your dreams includes just keeping your eye on your goal. It’s not magical, though, it just helps you stay aware of the opportunities that might help you along. For example, one time a friend asked to write an article for a local newspaper that she didn’t have time to write. I accepted right away and wrote that article and a few others for that newspaper. It helped me get my first few clippings.

I was able to do a few things here and there, but finding the time and energy to do everything necessary to become a writer was difficult in a catch-as-catch-can method; I needed a way to actually get small parts of the goal done in very small amounts of time.

The most important thing to do when you are low on time and energy is to have preplanned tasks that are easy to do in short segments, all ready to add to your schedule.  To do this, consider your overall goal.  Are you trying to pay down debt or save for something or become an artist or change jobs or something else? Think about what tasks would help you towards your goal.  For example, for paying down loans, having a lot of extra money would help towards this goal, for changing jobs education and/or experience may hold the keys.  When you’re already busy trying to live your life, these tasks probably seem overwhelming.  You can’t necessary get an extra job or go back to school full-time.  Many people feel that if they can’t do everything then they won’t be able to do it at all. Also, the time factor blocks some people. It’s hard to think about attaining your goals in 2 or 5 or 10 years.  People feel that something that far away may never happen.  They don’t necessarily want to put the energy into something that may never happen.

Try to forget about all that.  Put $5 a week extra into your debt. It may not seem like much and it isn’t much, but it might be painless to do and without thinking about it you’ll decrease your debt over time.  Take whatever goal you have an break it down into small pieces. What small action could possibly help you along?  You need to define the action.  I do very little when I set a goal of “sending out query letters.”  I need to be much more specific.  I need to decide on an idea, then write the letter, then figure out where to send it.  When I’m busy I can’t think up all the fine points of my task.  I need to have the goal one day of deciding on an idea, then another day of writing the letter.  It has to be obvious to me what needs to be done and when I can consider myself finished.  Pick some small and completely definable activity that will move you closer to your goal even if it’s only minutely closer to your goal then stick it into your routine.  Make it a habit.  When you are comfortable doing that try to do just a little bit more.

One of the most powerful tools that you can create and use in your life, to assure that you are moving towards your goals, are routines.  We all have routines for many of the mundane things in our lives.  We probably have a regular set of steps we take to get ourselves ready in the morning or to pay our bills or clean the house.  These aren’t things we’re crazy about doing, but having the routine helps us to remember to wash our hair and take the garbage out.  For example, when I’m in my glazed over mode in the shower, I know that if I’m washing my back that I’ve already washed my face and my hair, because they are first in the routine. I don’t have to think of much, which is good since I’m often pretty out of it when trying to shower.  If I had to think about it every day, that would add a lot of extra work to my life.  Creating routines for as many activities as possible, removes them from your thinking and creative mind.  You can get them done without exercising your brain.  In addition, those things get done!

Create routines to help you accomplish as many of your regular tasks as possible. Particularly, work on routines for the tasks that you don’t enjoy very much.  I don’t really like planning dinners. I don’t mind cooking them so  much, but I hate trying to think up what to eat every night.  I can create a calendar with meals planned for each night. That way I can both shop for food more efficiently and not have to think every night.  Sometimes I get lazy, though, and don’t do the planning so I have to spend more time every night thinking.  I need to find a place in my routine to add the task of planning dinners. If it becomes regular and second nature, it will get done. In addition, I used to choose my clothes for work every evening, another chore that I hate.  I finally decided to plan out my whole week of clothes, pull them out of the drawers, and pile them in a basket every Sunday.  It took about the  same amount of energy that each night took me, but once it was done once, it was over for the week.

What regular things need to be done in your household that you don’t want to do? There should be plenty of activities like that.  List the activities and start seeing how you can break them down into smaller pieces.  When I was responsible for the laundry, I would put a load in the washer every morning, move it to the dryer when I got home from work in the afternoon, and fold it at night.  That way I would always have all the laundry done and I rarely noticed doing it.  If you think of an onerous task that you can’t think of how to break down, start searching the Internet for sites that give helpful household hints (such as: Discover Organization, Blog about Helpful Household Hints, Fly Lady).

The idea is to take a large, uninteresting or undesirable activity and break them down into pieces so small that you can easily slip them into your routine without causing you too much misery.  Once you’ve broken down the task, see where you can fit the pieces into your daily routine. It’s easier to convince yourself to just throw one load of laundry into the washer instead of thinking of “doing laundry.”

If you have many good routines, think of what other activities could be put into more routines.  If you have few routines, start developing as many as you can.  You don’t need to start them all at once, just create them to use at a later time.  Start using your routines regularly.  If you need to write down the steps and post them on your refrigerator, do that.  I used to have my afternoon schedule posted on the refrigerator so that I would get all parts done even though I was worn out from work.  Your routines become the backbone of your day, your week, your life.  Good routines, that are used consistently, get things done.

Waiting for the inspiration to want to do these things will rarely afford you the productivity you need to achieve your goals. The nature of things that are put into routines is that they’re not things you really want to do.  Therefore, waiting until you want to do it, won’t get as much done.  Stay aware that these are things that you don’t necessarily want to do and therefore pushing yourself to do what needs to be done in routines is what will help you get ahead.

If you have difficulty initiating routines, tell me what those difficulties are in the comments. I’m interested in the obstacles people run into when trying to create or follow routines.