Making a Goal For The Day
After a week away and then getting my younger kid ready to go back to school today, I have a monster to-do list. Naturally, I decided that the main thing I needed to accomplish at this moment was to follow some new people on Twitter. If that’s your goal too, my handle is @elscob.
I admit, it’s a pretty low bar, but at least I could check one thing off that nasty list. I also put “make pulled pork in slow cooker EARLY” on the list (caps because I usually remember I wanted to use the slow cooker around 4:00 pm, when it does me no good), and got to check that off as well.
I blog A LOT about how I need concrete goals in order to be creative and move my projects forward. In July, I slipped a lot and didn’t really meet my goals. In August, I forgave myself and decided to skip having goals because they didn’t seem reasonable given my travel and work schedule. But here we are on the doorstep of September and I am planning next month’s Big To Do List. What should I do?
The purpose of the Big To Do List is to make Big Goals and break them down into smaller tasks so I can see progress, even though my life is generally too hectic to feel like such a thing is possible. For the several past Novembers, I’ve done National Novel Writing Month and have written two actual freaking books in the past two years. So what else can I accomplish?
It turns out there’s a creative goal you can set for every single month (of course). In April, there’s Poem-A-Day. October is Inktober, when you draw one ink drawing a day. There’s also Script Frenzy in April, a challenge to write 100 pages of a script in a month. February is a Month of Letters. Journal-a-Day in July? How about Solo Photo Book Month in June? You can find a pretty comprehensive list on wikiwrimo if you want to see more.
None of the September goals are calling out to me, so I’ve decided that in addition to my writing project goals (edit and query current works) and my work goals (do some work, I guess), I am going to do one other creative thing every day. Tasks will include new writing (fiction or poetry), drawing, painting, sewing or some other thing. For example, I really want to learn how to Dutch braid my own hair, and I’ve decided that will count. Heck, I might even write a letter or two. Whatever it is, it’ll be new and different and creative.
In October, I’ll aim for the ink drawing challenge and for November, I have a novel idea brewing in my head, but September will be all about trying new things.
