Squiggly sprint 24: Day 19 - Goal Setting

Day 19 of the SquigglySprint, and the topic today is Goal Setting.

The biggest challenge that I have seen around this topic is that you have to find a good balance between the goal and the journey to get there. My karate instructor often says that you shouldn’t be worried about a grading for a new belt. You should focus on the training, and if you do that the grading will come naturally.

This can be fine, when you have an external structure to work from. But the approach doesn’t work for everything. You can’t just say I’ll write every day, and then somewhere down the line I’ll have a novel. I collect all the things that I write and store them alongside each other. This is good for the process, as I can start to see connections and inspiration. At some point though I will need to make a decision about what I’m going to do with 50,000 words of unrelated topics, and that will be a whole different ball game.

I am a great fan of the Get Things Done framework, and something that I took away from the interview on the topic that Sarah did on the subject recently was that everything is a project, if you look at it in a granular enough way. That is the approach I’ve increasingly taken with all the things that I am doing. A big task like “Write a book”, “Get a promotion” or “Start a business” is intimidating. A project with 200 tasks on it, that you have been adding over time, is still intimidating, but at least you can start chipping away at to show progress, is far easier psychologically.

https://youtu.be/eaOkGuvqlwk