Tuesday, August 2, 2011

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.

2 comments:

  1. Oh, that's awesome! I read The Artists's Way many years ago and that author also points out how small things can make a big difference!

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  2. Thank you so much for this post, Claudia! I've been talking with friends about the same time issues, and a lot of it is, well, not being able to unplug! So, today, after reading your inspiring post, I'm going to change one thing that will free up time for writing. Maybe it will only be to write a single page or a paragraph, but "Little goals can make a big difference".

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