Making lists, crossing things off them

[dolorosa_12]

Today's snowflake_challenge is very, very much my thing:

In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.



In case you were unaware, I absolutely love to-do lists, goals, habit tracking, and similar. They are pretty much how I organise my life, in all spheres. There is something about a concrete list of goals, and the steady process of crossing them off when completed that really soothes me and helps me to function.



I have been like this about goals pretty much my whole life, and ever since I was a pretty small child, if I publicly or privately committed to doing something, that thing would get done, within my agreed on timeframe. This didn't, and doesn't have to be a written list recorded for posterity — it could be a verbal commitment, or even me just mentally saying to myself, I am going to write 500 words of this assignment today or I am going to practice the piano for half an hour every day, first thing in the morning. But as soon as the commitment was made, the thing happened.

Because I've always been Like This about goals and habits, I've also been really, really good at knowing my own limits and knowing what is achievable for me. If even a mental commitment is treated like an unbreakable contract with myself, I have to be really good at only committing to things that I am 100 per cent capable of achieving (barring uncontrollable external factors like disasters, war, illness or injury, etc). I have also developed, over the years, a very good sense of which goals should be treated like large, long-term things, which goals should be treated like a series of smaller, discrete projects, and which goals should be treated like a constant, unchanging set of habits or patterns of behaviour (i.e. stuff like 'do yoga every day,' which is a goal that is simultaneously finite, in that it is completed in a day, and endless, in that it carries on every day forever until I decide otherwise). When faced with long-term projects like my undergraduate Honours thesis, my MPhil dissertation, and my PhD thesis, I knew my mental health could not cope with a goal like 'complete a PhD, timeframe: four years,' and instead the goal became 'write 500 words of the PhD every weekday' (and later, when the writing was complete, 'edit 1000 words of the PhD every weekday').

That's the preamble. When it comes to goals, intentions, habit-building, new year's resolutions or whatever, I tend to divide them into tasks relating to mind, body, heart (by which I mean relationships), spirit (by which I mean mental health), house, and administrative tasks. Sometimes one category is more loaded with goals than others, sometimes one category has a lot of short-term goals and another has a single, harder long-term goal. This year I'm planning to do monthly goal check-ins here on Dreamwidth, after being inspired by forestofglory doing the same.

I'm not going to list any goals relating to my everyday life here — that's for my bullet journal, and for those monthly check-ins. My list here solely relates to fannish goals for 2023.

Write at least two treats (in addition to my assignment) for this year's Yuletide

Write at least one gift for Fandomtrees, if it runs again this year

Participate in Once Upon a Fic

Write at least one fanfic that is not for an exchange/fest/someone else's prompt

Reply to at least one person's Dreamwidth post from my circle every day (unless external factors such as travel, illness or an overloaded work schedule prevent me from logging in that day)

Continue to log each book read, each TV show, film, show or concert viewed on Dreamwidth, even if it's just with a single sentence

Comment on every fanwork read/viewed (unless it's apparent that it's not my cup of tea and I click out without reading the work in full)

Write a montly recs post

That seems like enough to be getting on with. I'd like to have a goal to participate in one new exchange this year (something happening around June/July/August/September would be ideal), but I can't commit to this unless there's an exchange that meets my requirements (needs to include or be focused on books and/or fairytales and mythology, needs to match on characters and not tropes, and in general needs to be character-focused rather than focused on a specific theme or trope). I'll keep my eyes out for something suitable but won't make this an explicitly stated goal.


As is probably obvious from all that, I'm not looking for advice about achieving any of those goals as I've got a pretty robust way of working through to-do lists. (Although if you know of an exchange that fits my specifications, do let me know!) I'm interested to hear about other people's goals — whether concrete, nebulous, or non-existent.

Comments

[turps]

I enjoyed reading your post and your love of lists and goals shone through.

Those are all excellent goals, and it looks like you'll be giving a lot of pleasure with comments and taking part in fests/exchanges etc as well as things you want for yourself.

Good luck with them all!

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you!

And, as you say, fandom is more fun as a collaborative activity, so it's nice to have goals that will help me create things for other people.

[yarnofariadne]

I'm the same way about to-do lists! They work so well with my brain. Best of luck with all your goals!

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you — and yes, to-do lists are just the best (as long as they're kept within manageable reason).

[vriddy]

Ooh I really like the Dreamwidth goal of one reply a day!! Simple and a nice way to keep one's circles active, like we talked about recently around your "putting in effort into the online spaces that suit me best" post :D

I'm also excited about the monthly recs list!! I've been sharing fanworks weekly in the bnha_fans quick recs post, and thinking that now that there's a year of it, it might be nice to start extracting some of them into themed lists. Not sure yet how I want to go about it to avoid putting pressure on myself while doing it. I'd really like to see more rec lists in general, and have more of my own to point people to when relevant.

[dolorosa_12]

I saw a lot of people seem to have a similar rec list goal — it feels as if lots of us are inspired in that direction at the moment. You're right that it's really important to keep goals like this manageable and sustainable — having goals that feel like too much pressure can turn what is meant to be a fun activity into something really stressful.

Good luck with your own rec list goals!

[vriddy]

Oh, that's excellent to hear! I'm very much behind on Snowflake again. Hearing this makes me hopeful we might see more rec lists pop up during the year! Just like last year, it felt to me like a common theme was sadness about inactive dreamwidth comms, and I feel like there was a decent bit of effort here and there afterwards that resulted in more activity in general.

Thank you!

[senmut]

This is a great list!

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you!

[thawrecka]

I'm pretty much the opposite in that I'm constantly fighting against my brain to even remember any goals I didn't write down, or where I wrote anything down, but I do well with my electronic to do list, at least. Most of my goals right now are about health or money, though.

[dolorosa_12]

I like writing down lists as well, it's more that if something is important enough to me, the written record becomes irrelevant because it's as if I've made an unbreakable promise to myself. It sounds as if you have a good system that suits you well, though.

Good luck with your current goals. I have goals like that as well, I just wanted to keep the goals in this post focused on fandom things.

[merit]

A goal makes everything so much more definitive - and easier to achieve for me ^^ though I agree, there's limits I also had to impose to ensure I wasn't over stretching myself.

[dolorosa_12]

Over-stretching is always a risk, and I think it's good — particularly when goals relate to fandom which is after all meant to be a fun hobby — to keep things sustainable and manageable. Otherwise the fun hobby starts to feel like a chore.

[lirazel]

I like reading about how you organize all your goals! Your commitment (lol) not to commit to things unless you know absolutely that you can follow through seems like one of those things that most of the time is a real asset (you're the opposite of flaky!) but do you ever find that it maybe holds you back from doing things you do want to do? Like, do you still move forward with things you want to do but can't absolutely commit to?

I'm only asking (and you do not have to answer this!) because I really like the idea of "no commitment unless I know I can do it" but I feel like I, personally, would fall into the trap of not trying things.

Anyway, all that to say: I admire your straightforward and list-driven approach to goals!!!

[dolorosa_12]

Your commitment (lol) not to commit to things unless you know absolutely that you can follow through seems like one of those things that most of the time is a real asset (you're the opposite of flaky!) but do you ever find that it maybe holds you back from doing things you do want to do? Like, do you still move forward with things you want to do but can't absolutely commit to?

This is a very good question, and you're probably right that it holds me back a bit. I am very much not a risk-taker (I can think of only one time in my life in which I took a serious risk; the risk paid off, but it did not encourage me to be less cautious in my choices). That being said, I feel I do push myself, particularly professionally and with goals relating to exercise — it's just that even in these areas, I still really know my limits: doing a humanities PhD was doable, but I would never have been capable of doing one in the sciences. I also tend to build up gradually to certain goals: when I decided I wanted to present at an academic conference, the first conference I picked was one hosted by my department, open only to postgraduate students — I didn't plunge into a massive international conference (or the smaller specialist conference that is really prestigious in my field) first thing, but now presenting at that kind of conference doesn't phase me (I gave a paper last year at a massive European librarian conference in a huge conference centre lecture theatre in front of hundreds of people and it was as easy as just talking to a handful of friends).

I take the same approach to all goals — if you aim for something wildly ambitious at the start, you're likely to fail. But if you aim incrementally for smaller things which will ultimately teach you how to do the big ambitious thing, you'll get there in the end.

I think this ties back to the incredibly Guess Culture family that I was raised in: you never asked for something unless you were close to 100 per cent certain it would be given (and in fact in most cases it would be offered without asking), and asking for something that people were unlikely to give was considered to be a very unreasonable way to behave, and likely to cause upset for both the asker and the askee. (Guess Culture is in some ways a very passive aggressive way of interacting; it works — and worked in my family — only if everyone is really clear on certain unspoken rules and assumptions about what is 'reasonable,' it doesn't work if you don't know the unspoken rules. Certainly the few times I asked for something as a child that I knew was unlikely to be granted, it went really badly.)

So I feel that I somehow ended up translating this Guess Culture way of being into the kind of things I asked of myself. Basically, I wound up in a situation where setting a goal that I knew I was likely to fail would be completely demoralising if I failed to meet it, whereas setting a less ambitious goal and achieving it would give me the momentum to continue on, possibly building up to more ambitious goals at a later point.

I don't know if that makes sense. Ultimately, I don't want to try anything too unattainable in a fannish context, because that would take the fun out of what is meant to be a fun hobby. This approach isn't going to work for everyone.

Anyway, all that to say: I admire your straightforward and list-driven approach to goals!!!

That's very kind of you to say!

[lirazel]

I really appreciate you taking the time to share these thoughts with me, even if it took me so long to reply!

I think you're right about the incremental goals ultimately building up to a bigger one.

And I'm struck again by the differences in culture--your Guess Culture sounds absolutely horrible to me! But I'm glad everyone operating in it understood it and so it worked out! But yeah, it makes sense that you would react to new situations in the way that you do, coming from that background. Isn't it so interesting to figure out "Oh, that's why I am the way I am"?

[svgurl]

The thought process behind your goal setting was interesting to read. It's cool that you have always been so goal oriented.

I definitely share a few of your goals and I like the one about replying to one person every day.

Good luck! :D

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you, and good luck to you too in terms of achieving your own goals!

[silveradept]

Good skills to you in achieving your goals for this year.

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you!