I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to convert(via Franklin-Covey), and my wife says she’s seen a marked improvement in that now I write things down that need to be done so I don’t forget about them. But my list was still more reactive than proactive – more tasks than goals. I knew certain things needed to be done on a schedule, so I’d schedule them. When new tasks came along that required attention, I added them to my list.
Every once in a while I would look at that list and see how many times tasks were sliding into tomorrow and despair. Well, no, I really didn’t care enough about it to despair. I just shook my head in frustration and wrote them on tomorrow’s list, until I decided I needed to do something about the colossal waste of time of manually rewrite those tasks into the future in my planner. I solved that by switching to software so all the things I failed to get done automatically moved to the next day.
I could solve the task problem if I just had someone else to do it all. Still, we’re talking tasks – not goals.
I’m a late-comer to goal-setting. I realized after 5-1/2 years of saying I wanted to be a writer (meaning actually writing stories, having people read them, AND get paid for it) that the only way it was going to happen was for me to stop saying it and just do it (thanx, Nike.) I set myself some goals (words per week, number of stories per year, how fast I had to get a rejected story to another traditional market, an ePublishing schedule), and “suddenly, overnight” I was producing stories in the double-digits (instead of 1 story in 2 years.)
The frustrating thing is, there’s this thing called life, and it keeps happening no matter how many times I try to avoid it. I look in my resolutions, goals, and schedule, and even though I never wrote down “Get rear-ended at a red light,” it still happened.
Planning is good for laying out the things you want to do, but who puts on the calendar: “Here is the week that my child will be sick?” Or sets aside time for a string of accidents that seem to come along so regularly that it make me wonder if they really are accidents, or if FATE just has it out for us.
I suppose you could block time in anticipation of this – leave yourself a contingency gap to cover when these things happen. But do people in Tornado Alley block off a couple of months in the spring and say “I won’t be doing anything here because there will be weather?” No – I don’t (although sometimes it makes me want to fold up and quit because I already (in JANUARY) see this year’s goals slipping under a barrage of illness, accidents, and other pleasantries.
You can’t get things done if you have to wait for all the lights to be green before you do anything. You have to do what you can, when you can. If you’re a blogger, maybe you wind up writing a post about the futility of trying to keep a schedule under a barrage of life. If you write longer works, maybe there’s a story in there.
Don’t let Life’s interruptions get to you. When you get back to your plans, you may find that what you just went through adds to your accomplishments rather than reduces them. And for a writer, all this living, ESPECIALLY the kind you didn’t choose to do because it was too difficult or because you didn’t have time for it in your schedule – all this living somehow adds gravitas to your writing that might have been missing without it.
What doesn’t kill me…
I’m not the greatest when it comes to organization of any sort.
I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to convert(via Franklin-Covey), and my wife says she’s seen a marked improvement in that now I write things down that need to be done so I don’t forget about them. But my list was still more reactive than proactive – more tasks than goals. I knew certain things needed to be done on a schedule, so I’d schedule them. When new tasks came along that required attention, I added them to my list.
Every once in a while I would look at that list and see how many times tasks were sliding into tomorrow and despair. Well, no, I really didn’t care enough about it to despair. I just shook my head in frustration and wrote them on tomorrow’s list, until I decided I needed to do something about the colossal waste of time of manually rewrite those tasks into the future in my planner. I solved that by switching to software so all the things I failed to get done automatically moved to the next day.
I could solve the task problem if I just had someone else to do it all. Still, we’re talking tasks – not goals.
I’m a late-comer to goal-setting. I realized after 5-1/2 years of saying I wanted to be a writer (meaning actually writing stories, having people read them, AND get paid for it) that the only way it was going to happen was for me to stop saying it and just do it (thanx, Nike.) I set myself some goals (words per week, number of stories per year, how fast I had to get a rejected story to another traditional market, an ePublishing schedule), and “suddenly, overnight” I was producing stories in the double-digits (instead of 1 story in 2 years.)
The frustrating thing is, there’s this thing called life, and it keeps happening no matter how many times I try to avoid it. I look in my resolutions, goals, and schedule, and even though I never wrote down “Get rear-ended at a red light,” it still happened.
Planning is good for laying out the things you want to do, but who puts on the calendar: “Here is the week that my child will be sick?” Or sets aside time for a string of accidents that seem to come along so regularly that it make me wonder if they really are accidents, or if FATE just has it out for us.
I suppose you could block time in anticipation of this – leave yourself a contingency gap to cover when these things happen. But do people in Tornado Alley block off a couple of months in the spring and say “I won’t be doing anything here because there will be weather?” No – I don’t (although sometimes it makes me want to fold up and quit because I already (in JANUARY) see this year’s goals slipping under a barrage of illness, accidents, and other pleasantries.
You can’t get things done if you have to wait for all the lights to be green before you do anything. You have to do what you can, when you can. If you’re a blogger, maybe you wind up writing a post about the futility of trying to keep a schedule under a barrage of life. If you write longer works, maybe there’s a story in there.
Don’t let Life’s interruptions get to you. When you get back to your plans, you may find that what you just went through adds to your accomplishments rather than reduces them. And for a writer, all this living, ESPECIALLY the kind you didn’t choose to do because it was too difficult or because you didn’t have time for it in your schedule – all this living somehow adds gravitas to your writing that might have been missing without it.
What doesn’t kill me…
<<<>>>
My story experiment with making my story B.I.T. free on Smashwords will last one more week at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/134102?ref=notimetothink
Check it out! Give it a read, and then rate and review
it, and tell your friends. Thanx!
<<<>>>
William Mangieri’s writing can be found in many places,
including:
· Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/william-mangieri?store=book&keyword=william+mangieri
