Lessons Learned Setting and Missing Goals
Two years ago I made a commitment to myself to post once a week. This is the third post in that time. I could list a number of reasons as to why I missed this goal, but the reality is it wasn’t a priority. Despite how much I love the idea of posting more often, it’s something I’ve not made time for. And that’s okay.
In hindsight, posting once a week was an aggressive commitment. I’d previously posted 4-5 times a year. A more sensible and achievable goal would have been once a month. Despite this seeming like a failure, I’m actually quite happy with the outcome. I learnt something about myself and how I like to write.
The first take-away is set realistic goals. Despite advising others against doing this, I went ahead and made the classic mistake of overreaching. The reason the C25K (Couch To 5k) running program is so successful is that it gets people to their goal gradually. No-one is expected to run 5kms on day one. Expecting myself to write 1000 words a week that I was happy with was essentially like asking myself to run 5k at pace in my first attempt. I gave it shot but ultimately lost my momentum.
Secondly, review my goals. It was clear 2 months in that I was never going to hit a post a week. This would have been the perfect time to re-evaluate and set a goal more inline with my commitment and expectations. I actually have a fortnightly task set up to do just this. However, posting once a week was not on this list of goals as I considered it too obvious.
Lastly, write small. Something that continues to trip me up with blogging is expecting every post I write to be a 1000-word critical think piece. I have so many learnings day-to-day that would make for great insights, yet I overlook these as being trivial and not interesting to others. But that’s just the thing; this blog is for me. The whole point is that I’m writing for myself.
There was one other learning I have, but I’m not sure what to do with it. I found trying to write blog posts at a specific time didn’t work for me (I tried Saturday morning). This makes for an interesting conundrum. How do I make time to write when I having a set time isn’t conducive to writing? Perhaps it was just the wrong time – I don’t seem to have the same issue when writing my journal. Or perhaps the goal of writing an entire post in one go is unrealistic.
Whatever the answer, I’m looking forward to figuring it out and getting a few more posts up here. Whenever that may be.