Making lists, crossing things off them
Jan. 23rd, 2023 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Today's ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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 byforestofglory 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.
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-24 10:36 pm (UTC)Thank you!