Little Goals

At our writing group retreat last week, we had a Saturday night discussion that focused, among other things, on the questions: What things do you do to sabotage your own happiness? What things can you do to sustain and nurture yourself instead? We each left with a goal to work on. The interesting thing was how small these goals were - and yet how important.

One person, too busy with her demanding full-time job to find any time to write lately, is going to write a poem a day. Just one little poem. She's been doing it for four days now and is ENRAPTURED by this.

Another person is going to buy a room-sized air conditioner for her upstairs home office so that she can work in cool peacefulness.

A third person is going to start each day with exercise.

And me? I'm going to check email only once an hour and not at all after 7:30 p.m. No more obsessive checking of email every thirty seconds all day long!! I was first going to try checking email just four times a day, but I decided, after consultation with the others, that it was better to start with a lesser goal that I could achieve, and work up from there, than with a more ambitious goal that would set me up for failure.

So far I'm loving this reclaiming of my time and energy and life. If I win some major award between 10 and 11, well, it doesn't really matter if I have to wait 60 minutes to find this out. How much better to use that 60 minutes actually writing something worthy of winning the award, right?

Little goals can make a big difference.