A couple of years ago I did NaNoMoWri. For those of you who don’t know about NaNoMoWri, it’s an online group of people who spend November writing a novel.  The goal is to reach 50,000 words in the 30 days.  I had heard about it a couple of years ago, but was working two jobs.  When I had  more free time I figure I’d try.  I do very well with deadlines and a bit of pressure.

It made me think, though, about small goals and how they grow together to become something big.  To write 50,000 words in 30 days you have to write about 1667 words a day or more one day and less another.  It’s not that many words really, but if you do it you end up with a novel-length manuscript in the end. That’s not to say that what is written will be good, but the fact that so many big things can be approached with such little effort is amazing.  If someone wanted to write a novel and take a whole two months instead of one month, that’s just under 900 words a day.

One of the reason that many people can achieve this 50,000 words goal or even more is that they have chosen a goal and chosen a deadline.  These two things work together.  it’s important to have a goal so you know where you want to go, but it’s also important to have some kind of timeline.  Without a timeline, even one that you do not make, you are free to just continuously put off your goal or even the tasks required to achieve that goal.

Procrastination is what keeps almost all goals from being achieved.

We put things off, we make excuses. We assume that we can’t do it.  We find other tings that are not uncomfortable to do instead of doing the tasks that will take us to our goals.

Right now, I have huge amounts of free time.  I can earn enough money in a relatively short part of my day and then I can do what I want.  The problem is that I haven’t set any time lines for myself.   I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do and what steps will get me where I want to go. The problem is that I haven’t set any dead lines.  I’m just meandering along without doing much towards my goal.  I know that if I would put deadlines on certain aspects of the task, I would get far more done and achieve my goal faster.  The problem is making myself do it, especially when I don’t have to.

NaNoMoWri gives me the incentive to move ahead.  It only happens in November, so I can’t really put it off unless I want to wait for next year which doesn’t make any sense.  It’s flexible so if I don’t get it all written I’m still fine.

The point is, find some way to motivate yourself.  Find someone or even yourself to give you an incentive to work on your larger goals.  My initial writing goal was to have a writing career by the time I was 50.  I still have many years left to achieve that, but maybe I should shorten the timeline.  Maybe I should make financial goals for next year and the year after and so forth.  One thing that’s becoming clear is that I need to impose some clarity about goals, tasks and deadlines for myself if I want to transition to a writing career.

I was able to complete the novel in those 30 days, but it’s taken me over two years to edit and proofread it.  It’s a smaller job, but without a deadline it wasn’t a priority.

Goals need a pull (the goal) and a push (the deadline).  Find ways to create both so that you can really get yourself moving ahead.

by Aileen Journey

I used to hate cleaning with all my heart. Basically, it was a whole lot of work with little reward because once you were done, you had to do it all over again and that went quadruple once I had kids.

When I was a kid my room seemed like a mountain of junk that I could never tackle. I was just yelled at to get it cleaned and I had little idea of how to do it.

When I grew up I hated living in messy places. Just looking around and seeing clutter made me anxious and cleaning made me anxious so I was pretty stuck.

At some point in my adulthood I realized that starting by picking up one thing and then another often got an area cleaner. As I continued trying to figure out how to keep my environment cleaner, I started categorizing things. I would either focus on just one small area and get that clean then move to another or I would focus on one category of clutter, like clothes strewn about or garbage and pick all of that up first.

Another tactic I like is cleaning up a bit between other responsibilities. If I had work to do at home I would break up the chunks of work with bits of cleaning. I would make the cleaning feel like a break from work since there was little thinking involved.

It seemed also that practice helped. Recently, I’ve found that cleaning doesn’t bother me much at all. I know that if I pick up one thing at a time it’ll get cleaned soon. This has helped me clean more often which, in turn, makes it easier to clean each time since it’s not that messy.

Staying ahead of tasks seems to be what helps make things so much easier.

by Aileen Journey

I went to an Indigo Girls concert the other night. I remember hearing them for the first time in 1989 when I first came out. It brought me back to my early twenties. I was so ambitious back then. There were so many things I wanted in life and I felt like everything I wanted required huge amounts of effort. Everything seemed so incredibly difficult. I felt like I either had to jump tall buildings or fall and do nothing. I seemed to have no idea how to get where I wanted to go.

Now older and wiser, I’ve achieved just about everything I wanted. Looking back I realize that if I hadn’t seen the future as this huge rock that had to be lifted up hill, but instead was more like piling ring up small stones, I may have arrived at the same place without quite so much angst.

I guess the angst might be part of the deal, but if I could talk to the me that first started listening to the Indigo Girls twenty-something years ago, I would say, “just figure out your goals and start doing one tiny part of them at time…” Anybody can do almost if they do little bit at time over many years.