Goal Update
Posted by Jo | Filed under Productivity
Write 1000 words on the novel daily
I missed a couple days of writing, but I ended up with about 6000 words for the week. Right now, the novel is my top priority. I’m about 35,000 words in, and I think it’s good. I’m hoping to have it finished and ready to “rest” for a month while I do NaNoWriMo.
Write 3 blog posts for each blog
I so missed this one. I should have done nine posts; I did four.
Go through my email
I did manage to do this one, off and on through the week. That was only because I installed Digsby and was able to check my email when I’m updating twitter.
Leave 40 comments on others’ blogs
This one was way too ambitious I’m afraid. I’m not one to leave useless comments, so finding someting useful to say on forty posts is a bit much. I think I left about a dozen comments through the week on various blogs.
Spend 2 hours visiting Entrecard blogs and dropping cards
I did about an hour of Entrecard promotions this week.
- Spend one hour on the Zombie short story I have going
- Buy some ad campaigns for the blogs
- Check elance for projects I might like to bid on
- Write two articles to sell on Constant Content
I didn’t get to any of this work this week. Oh well… better luck next time.
For next week, I think I’ll keep the goals the same and see what happens.
Review
Setting goals isn’t very useful unless you review how you’re doing in meeting the goals. That’s why I post my goals publicly, and review how I’m doing publicly as well.
Even more so for me, it’s important to think about why I’m “hitting” or “missing” my goals. I think I’m simply over-scheduling myself. I work full time and have a life outside my work and writing, like everyone does. And, (gasp!) I do give myself a night off from my writing from time to time.
So why do I set such lofty goals? Part of the reason is that I believe that if I push myself, I’ll get more completed than if I don’t. If my goal were something doable, like writing 7000 words/week only, then I’d almost certainy meet the goal, but how far beyond that would I go? Honestly, I’m afraid not that far. However, if I push myself to do more than I can reasonably expect to accomplish, I do more than I originally expected to.
I realize that logic may seem odd to some people. I’m accustomed to working like that though. When I was in college, I also held down a job. I remember one of my instructors would try to talk me into quitting one each time I’d see her for registration. I couldn’t afford to quit my job, so I was frustrated that she kept pushing me to, essentially, postpone college until I could be a full-time student. I think that was when I began to push myself to do more than I might reasonably expect.
In my “real” job, I work in the IT field, which is notorious for high work loads. It’s common for me to have much more work to do than I can expect to finish in the next few days, or even couple weeks.
I think I’ve simply gotten accustomed to pushing myself to do more, and even more. The good news is that I can get a lot accomplished sometimes. The bad news is that I tend to get stressed because of the pressure I put on myself.
Anyone else have issues like these?
Further Reading
- None Found
October 14th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
This is a cool post about coupons.
i need this info for my site.