Goals, resolutions & flexibility

“What’s the point of making resolutions if you know you’re just going to break them anyway?” – Everyone and their dog

I closed out 2009 with a post about my various failures and successes for the year that just ended. You can only succeed or fail at something if you deliberately undertook doing it. No one can ever accuse me of failing to swim across the Atlantic because I never said I would attempt it (and because there are sharks). Similarly, if I one day break the world record for pacing, I will not have succeeded at anything because I never undertook the challenge of breaking a world record for pacing (I just pace a lot).

To succeed or fail, a person needs goals. If you never set yourself goals, you will never fail, but you will also never succeed. I like setting goals even if it means I fail sometimes. There are a lot of arguments for why people should have goals, but for my purposes, I’ll simply say that I need them, otherwise I’m unhappy. As a result, I’m constantly setting goals for myself. Short-term, mid-term, long-term, etc. It’s borderline obsessive behaviour.

My habit of creating goals is the reason why I haven’t had an official New Year’s resolution for a couple of years. A New Year’s resolution is just a name for a goal that you set for yourself for a given year on January 1st of that year. By that token, you could say that writing 52 short stories in a single year was my New Year’s resolution for 2009. I didn’t think of it that way, but it fits.

Around now, there are a lot of numbers being crunched about how many people make resolutions, and how many stick to them. The numbers aren’t pretty. But, the biggest reason that more people don’t stick to their resolutions is because they’re not used to goal setting. Goal setting’s been distilled to a science by some, but it’s at the very least an art, with those who practice it most getting better at it than those who don’t.

Today I asked a handful of people if they made New Year’s resolutions, all of them told me they don’t make resolutions anymore because they never stick to them anyway. I really don’t think a history of failing to meet goals means that you should stop setting them. Instead, I think it’s an excellent opportunity to set goals differently. General goals are important, but they should be refined with smaller milestones, that can be measured, and that have shorter deadlines.

If your goal for 2010 is to exercise more, that’s great, but break it down. By the end of March, maybe you want to be averaging 2 hours of exercise a week. By the end of June, maybe you want that up to 4 hours a week. By the end of September, you’re up to 8. By the end of the year, you’re averaging 12 hours a week of exercise. Now you’ve got milestones. If three month chunks are still too big to swallow, you can break it down to monthly or weekly. This is how I’m breaking down my goals for 2010.

Another thing that I can’t really understand is why people seem to think that they have to have their goals laid out by January 1. If you’re not sure what your goal is, don’t arbitrarily rush it just to say that you have a resolution.

Flexibility is underrated in goal setting. My writing goals for 2010 are mapped out, and I know what I want to accomplish, but I also have about 4 or 5 non-writing goals for 2010. Rather than take them all on and fail at all of them, I’d rather focus on 1 or 2, and actually stand a chance at success. Unfortunately, I can’t decide what to cut, so I’m going to give myself some extra time to decide what’s most important.

That being said, this is my writing blog, so here are my 2010 writing goals:

• 30 short stories
• 20 blog posts on 52SS
• 45 blog posts on AdamDiStefano.com
• 12 articles for TheNextGreatGeneration.com
• 20 articles for sites that I don’t currently write for
• 2 Top Secret projects (both of which are writing intensive)

You’ll notice that whereas last year I tried to focus my goal on a single area of writing (short fiction), this year I’m branching out significantly. The reason for this is that it’s the more organic way for me to work. I can’t write fiction non-stop for a whole year. For my own sanity, I need diversity.

The other notable difference between this year and last is that I’m planning to do a lot more outside work. Last year, just about all my writing was done for myself and for my blogs. This year, I’ll be writing for others, and collaborating with others. This is something that I did more of in years past, and came to realize over the course of the past year that I missed it, so I will be doing more of it.

And what about you? What are your goals for 2010, or even just for this month? Writing or otherwise? What do you do to make sure you stick to your goals?