Today is January 30th. The year is 8% over. It’s time to think about refining your goals.
When it comes to the goals you’ve set, does the end of January make you feel stressed, or do you feel you’ve enough time to comfortably catch up with them?
Or is it a moot point because you caved in withing the first couple of weeks, or on quitters day?
Whether you’re feeling stressed or you gave in, it doesn’t really matter because February 1st is a good time to think about refining your goals.
If you were too ambitious
You may have set your goals too high. Bitten off more than you can chew (so to speak).
This is often the case with writing, some authors decide they’re going to write a book a month, and when they get to this point, they realise they can’t keep up with the workload they’ve given themselves.
Your goals should be realistic, they should give you some hope you can achieve them.
To use the writing example, if you’ve previously written a book every two months, it’s more likely you’ll succeed at one a month than if you haven’t previously taken less than a year to write one.
If you’re not on track, you may need to reconsider whether your goal is actually doable for you, or you need to give yourself more time.
If you were closing out other projects in January with the intention to making more space to ramp up your efforts in February, then now’s the time to think more carefully about that.
If you weren’t ambitious enough
It’s also possible your goals are too small for you to make much of an effort.
Another common resolution is to quit smoking.
And a common method is to smoke less, for example, to gradually reduce the numbers of cigarettes you smoke one by one over time.
If you haven’t set any boundaries around this, you might find you’re not actually smoking less. Or have just cemented the habit of smoking one less cigarette.
Not enough preparation
Another common goal is losing weight.
Which is a serious undertaking, not to be taken lightly. And required an amount of effort to work out how you’re going to do it.
- Are you going to eat less? Is that less calories or less high calorie foods? Did you throw out all the food items you don’t want to eat?
- Are you going to exercise more? What kind of exercise? Where will you make the time? Do you have the gear you need?
- Are you going to track your efforts? How, and in what format?
It’s quite a lot to plan.
When I gave up smoking, I prepared by buying my first week’s nicotine patches, so I was prepared and ready to start. Or stop. So when I smoked my last cigarette at the end of the day, I became a non-smoker the day after.
If it’s making you miserable
Maybe you are on track to meet your goals, but you now know the effort is unsustainable.
If you don’t change your goals, you’ll burn out and quit.
But how?
Refining your goals
January might be as good as over, but there are still eleven months of the year to go.
That’s not to say you can’t refine your goals at any time, just that the end of January is a logical time to do it.
Rather than quitting, you can assess how you’ve gone, work out what the issues are, and refine your goals.
To find the middle ground between too hard and too easy, something that’s just enough of a stretch to make you feel like you’re really achieving something.
The key, of course, is planning and habits.
Planning
And as I’ve discovered with my goals, having at least an idea how I’m going to achieve them makes all the difference. So, think more seriously about what you hope to achieve, and how you’re going to do that.
Buy your nicotine patch equivalent, decide what parameters need to be met to start, and then implement.
Know what you want to write when you sit down to write.
Habits
The easiest way to achieve goals, is to link them to your existing habits.
So, think about how you’re going to change your days and weeks to fit working towards your goals into them.
There’s a lot of planning and adjustment needed.
Perhaps you now understand you’re never going to feel like visiting the gym after work, so you’ll arrange a weekly squash game with a friend, a lunchtime yoga class, and a regular breakfast smoothie. Substitute a piece of fruit for your three o’clock chocolate bar.
Feedback Loops
One of the most useful things for achieving any kind of goal is tracking, and often the best kind of tracking is to start a streak.
Jerry Seinfeld famously had a daily joke writing streak.
Track how many sequential days or weeks you take a step towards your goal
This usually involves a calendar, or a note in your diary, journal or agenda. You might add stickers, colour in blocks, or just draw a big line through the date for each day you kept going.
This works for word count, glasses of water, days exercised, days not smoking and many more besides.
It’s not too long before the pressure of all those little marks add up and you don’t want to break the streak. That’s how I managed to write a short story a week for 60 weeks.
February is the new January
I haven’t hit my goals for the month, but I also knew when I made them there was a project I wanted to finish by the end of this month.
I made an allowance for that.
The project turned out to be a wee bit more complicated than I’d anticipated, though complications aside, I’ve reached the point I’d hoped to reach by this point in the year. But, the complications can be taken care of, a little bit at a time as the rest of the year passes by.
And that means, that February 1, is now my January 1, and I can put that newly freed up time towards the rest of my projects.
How are you getting on with your goals?
You can find my monthly reports and other planning related information on the Life Worth Living page.
Planning a Life Worth Living
Let’s face it, life is short. If you don’t stop to think about how you’re going to make it count, at the end of the day, it won’t.
Planning a Life Worth Living applies business techniques to personal concerns. Using these techniques, you’ll get to the end of the year satisfied with what you’ve achieved.
Take a look at how I do my planning.
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