By Yvonne Ventresca
It's that New Year’s resolution time of year.
To paraphrase a concept in Julia Cameron's Finding Water: how old will we be by the time we learn to play piano, or complete a major project, or finish the novel? The same age we’ll be if we do nothing. We’ll all be older in a year, regardless of what we did or did not accomplish, so we need to make the most of our time.
To paraphrase a concept in Julia Cameron's Finding Water: how old will we be by the time we learn to play piano, or complete a major project, or finish the novel? The same age we’ll be if we do nothing. We’ll all be older in a year, regardless of what we did or did not accomplish, so we need to make the most of our time.
To help make this the best year ever, first you have to decide what you want to achieve. Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog, suggests asking yourself, "What one goal, if you achieved it, would have the greatest positive effect on your life?”
Once you’ve decided, the hard part is making that goal happen. I have six tips to help.
1. First, consider whether the goal is under your control. If not, it might be impossible to achieve it. For example, if my goal is to have a novel acquired by an editor and published next year, that’s not under my control. My goal could be to draft a novel, and thoroughly revise it, and have my agent submit it, but I can’t actually control what happens after that (and certainly not an editor's timeline for publication). It’s important to make sure you are setting goals that revolve around your own actions.
1. First, consider whether the goal is under your control. If not, it might be impossible to achieve it. For example, if my goal is to have a novel acquired by an editor and published next year, that’s not under my control. My goal could be to draft a novel, and thoroughly revise it, and have my agent submit it, but I can’t actually control what happens after that (and certainly not an editor's timeline for publication). It’s important to make sure you are setting goals that revolve around your own actions.
| Fun fact: the Babylonians are the first recorded people to make yearly resolutions over 4000 years ago. | 2. Decide what your goal looks like when it's accomplished. “Being more healthy” is too vague, for example. Does that mean exercising three times a week or eating more vegetarian meals or meditating or what? Health has a lot of aspects to it, so you need to be specific. If your goal is to be more successful at work for example, figure out how you’ll know you’ve achieved that. |
3. “The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning,” says Brian Tracy, (Eat That Frog, page 3). “You must develop the routine of ‘eating your frog’ before you do anything else.” This can require a big shift in how we spend our days. When we accomplish significant things in the morning, we have a guilt-free rest of the day. The key is to try not to save the harder tasks for "later."
4. If this is a repeated attempt to achieve a goal, carefully consider why you haven’t accomplished it yet. What's preventing you from success? What can you do differently? Chris Bailey suggests starting each day by imagining it's over. Reflect on the three main things (you imagine) you are so glad to have accomplished. Then at the end of the week, check to see how realistic those three daily accomplishments were (The Productivity Project, page 42).
5. To help stay on track with your goals, you may want to hold yourself accountable by telling someone. People who share their goals often feel a stronger motivation to complete them. November was National Novel Writing Month, and people all over the world tried to write 50,000 words between November 1st and November 30th. What’s interesting is the idea that you track the words on a website, and you have writing buddies who can see your word count. Signing up in public adds a whole different dimension, because you feel this sense that you have to achieve what you said you would. It results in many completed first drafts.
6. How can you help free up time and mental energy to achieve your goals? One way is to develop a system to clear your mind. In Getting Things Done, David Allen theorizes that “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them." This is an interesting concept. If there’s a lot of chatter in your brain, like you need a present for your nephew’s birthday, and you have to mail your bio for a book festival you'll be participating in, and why haven’t you called that person for your novel research – that takes up a lot of bandwidth, a lot of energy to remember. You can’t possibly be thinking about important strategic ideas, creative answers to problems, and meaningful insights if all this stuff is floating around your brain. Develop a system (paper or electronic) that works for you, and use it to store your all of your to-do information. Keep these notes someplace safe, make a system to check them regularly, then free up your mind for all the good creative work to happen.
I hope you find these tips helpful as you plan next year's goals. A quote to end on:
Here's to a fresh start in the new year! Feel free to share your resolutions in the comments.
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