Tag Archives: resolutions

It’s the first day of your arbitrary time demarcation—embrace it

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“Life is short. So do the things that make you happy. Be with those that make you happy. Look for the good in every day—even if some days you have to look a little harder!”
“Life is short. So do the things that make you happy. Be with those that make you happy. Look for the good in every day—even if some days you have to look a little harder!”
There is a lot of baggage on the notion of New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t want to rehash all the arguments. And I really don’t want to get into a pedantic semantics argument about the arbitrariness of the calendar and so forth. Trust me, I know. But I also know from personal experience that when I set goals and also set up some sort of mechanism for reporting on them, I actually make major progress toward them. So, I’m going to set some goals for the year. I’m publishing them on my personal blog and on my Patreon. I am currently planning to post monthly updates about my progress on my Patreon, rather than at the blog. But I also may do some sort of cross-post.

Some years ago a friend suggested the analogy of how one trains a dog: you can’t get rid of a bad behavior without replacing it with something else that fulfills the same need for the pup. In other words, replace a habit you don’t like with a new one that you do. This has helped me make a number of changes in my own behavior over the years since.

For various reasons, when I started setting my annual goals using this method, I kept setting four goals. And other than 2017, when two of those goals were related to external forces (specifically, our involuntary relocation from our home of 20+ years and a surgery my husband required) I have never managed to make progress on all four. So this year, I’m going to cut the goals back to three, and see if that works a little bit better.

My goals for 2019:

  • Don’t get mad, keep focused. It has always been the case that I find it easy to rant and get outraged about injustices and the like in the world. And this outrage burns up a lot of energy. That’s why for several years I’ve had a goal related to reducing or controlling my outrage. The last two years we’ve all had a lot of anxiety and outrage fatigue. I think I’ve done a reasonably good job of paying enough attention to try to protect myself and my family, while not getting overwhelmed. So I’m going to get try this year to keep (and in some areas increase) my focus on things I can control. My tasks are: write about about things I love, including more book reviews and the like on my blog; continuing listening to music and audiobooks more than news podcasts and the like; carve out some time to paint of make music each month.
  • Take care of business. There are a number of things that I’ve procrastinated on. It’s been easy to let my insane work schedule derail plans. I’ve made a list of 10 tasks that I just need to finish. The plan is to knock off a minimum of one a month. Some of the tasks have confidentiality issues, so I’m going to remain vague on this..
  • Revise and finish. I’ve been in an unending iterative loop of proofing/editing one novel for an embarrassingly long time. I tried to balance that by looking at calls for submissions and writing to those. That has not worked out. I don’t seem to ever meet the expectations of those calls. And the time spent writing those stories should have gone to finishing the books I have and just self-publishing them So, that’s what I’m doing this year. My task is: set specific monthly writing/editing goals each month.

Wish me luck!

And I hope everyone (well, everyone except the alleged president of the United States and any of his enablers) has a joyous and blessed 2019.

Confessions of an equivocator with delusions of ruthlessness

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“Better gay than grumpy.” (click to embiggen)
“Better gay than grumpy.” (click to embiggen)

There’s a lot of things I didn’t finish during my Christmas vacation. I have three very different half-written blog posts that I wanted to squeeze in before the end of the year. I spun my wheels for many reasons, one being that I wasn’t sure that the particular mood or perspective on the issue under discussion was something I wanted to put out there. This is similar to one of the reasons that I didn’t do any updates about my goals for the last few months. After completing the move, I re-evaluated the goals, because two of the big goal categories had been centered on the move and things that we had to take care of before moving. And certain parts of the new goals weren’t topics that I felt were appropriate to share in a public blog post.

The other problem I had was that I was trying to get my Patreon creator’s page sorted out. I’d set it up with an introduction and some levels and things, but the rewards or whatever you want to call them were contradictory, and not necessarily things that I could really commit to on a monthly basis. So I was trying to get that plan sorted out. And it occurred to me that a monthly blog post about my goals and how I was doing on them was more appropriate there, and is a fairly common sort of benefit to get at a low level of patronage. So it would defeat the purpose of the Patreon if I were sharing those posts for free at this blog, right?

Then there was just the craziness and stress of work, the holidays, the continuing existential crisis posed by our current political system, trying to figure out how to take care of ourselves for the holidays without have to navigate the minefield of my trump-supporting and often homophobic relatives, and NaNoWriMo and my actual writing (which is what a lot of the goals, particularly the ones that ought to be shared on Patreon are in aid of), and so on…

Not to mention the panic kicked off when Patreon announced the big change in fees that caused thousands of patrons to rescind their pledges and the creators to start scrambling for alternatives before the policy was rescinded!

The upshot is that I’m still trying to find a new rhythm to get my workweek, writing, and social life in synch…. Continue reading Confessions of an equivocator with delusions of ruthlessness →

You never know where you’re goin’ ’til you get there! (or, Revising my goals)

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“People with goals succeed because they know where they're going.”
“People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going.”
When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to do monthly updates, since the years I’ve done that has resulted in better results than years I haven’t. This year has been complicated by the move, my husband’s surgery, and more craziness in my work schedule than usual. So there was a month that I didn’t post an update because we were swamped in the actual move. Then I declared June a reset month as we still had a lot of unpacking to do and were still trying to settle into new routines. By the end of June I’d realized that I really needed to reassess and reframe some of the goals, which is why in July’s update I only talked in really general terms.

The big goals now are mostly the same, but I’ve tweaked them a bit and decided to rearrange their priority:

Take care of us: reduce and prioritize. The move has changed a lot of things, and left us with a bunch of new tasks. People kept warning me before the move that it always takes longer to unpack than you think, for instance. And so far they’ve been right. It’s important to remember to take rests, not to let ourselves stress about things, and so on. However, not having the house quite as organized as we would like and so forth contributes to our stress level. So I’m going to count everything we do to further the unpacking and organizing of the house in this category, too. Which means this is no longer a separate main goal.

Don’t get mad, stay busy. My tasks are: write about things I love; listen to music and audiobooks more and podcasts less; spend at least half of my lunch break writing; set specific monthly writing/editing goals in each check-in.

Write, submit, and publish. More than half the year is gone and I’ve only submitted to two places. I have consolidated all of my notes for the revisions to the first novel. I spent much of July trying to get the editing/revision pass finished. While I need to work on finding other places to submit shorter work, I also need to get the big stuff done.

My specific tasks for June and July were:

  • Get back into the rhythm of editing the novel. Only so-so. I got work done, but I haven’t got new habits. Considering eight weeks of unplanned overtime as a mitigating factor, I’m going to consider this a mixed success.
  • Write at least two blog posts each month about things I like, rather than rants or commentaries. Done. Two one month and three the other!
  • Get the iris bulbs, monitors, and other things that we want to give away handed off to people who said they wanted them. We got a lot of stuff handed off, but there are still several people who wanted iris bulbs that I haven’t hooked up with since digging up the irises. So, half done.
  • Go through the rest of the Christmas decoration bins and finish that purge. Done! Finished! Completed! They are out of here, and the small number of boxes we had room for in the walk-in closet contain all the Christmas ornaments we kept.
  • Write something that isn’t in one of the novels. Sort of. I’ve written several things that I’m calling “prose skits.” They are stand alone vignettes that don’t have a traditional plot an resolution. But all of them are at least related to my fantasy novel series thus far.
  • Make significant progress on revising the first novel. Another sort of. I got through several more chapters, but a lot less than I hoped for.

It’s a mixed bag, but there was at least some progress on every task.

So, for August my tasks are:

  • Revise, revise, revise the novel.
  • Write at least two blog posts about things I like, rather than rants or commentaries.
  • Write at least two blog posts about the writing process.
  • Complete my action items from the last Corporate Board meeting.
  • Get more stuff handed off and finish cleaning out the veranda.
  • Get gaming sessions scheduled.
  • Review calls for submissions and figure out something to write for one of them.

Wish me luck!

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel, or an oncoming train?

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When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to do monthly updates, since the years I’ve done that has resulted in better results than years I haven’t. The crazy wrinkle this year was that we knew that sometime after May 8th the new owners of the old building would give us a final move out notice, but that we couldn’t actually move until after Michael’s surgery and recovery was complete, which made it difficult to find a place to move to, since no one was willing to hold a place for more than a few weeks.

The last time I posted about the goals was at the end of March, when Michael was only a bit over a week into the recovery. My specific tasks for April were:

  • Pack and move!
  • Pack and move.
  • Squeeze some writing time in somehow.
  • Remember to have fun at NorWesCon (whether we attend the whole weekend or not).
  • Write at least two blog posts about things I like.

Once we finally had a lease signed in mid-April, that meant that my goals for the rest of April and all of May were:

  • Pack and move!
  • Move and unpack.
  • Clean out the old place.
  • Try to keep squeezing writing time in.

We’ve still got a lot of unpacking to do, but we’ve moved, so yay!

I got some writing in, but most of it was blogging. I did a lot of blog writing on the bus and during lunch at work. Having a slightly longer bus ride in (and being too far out to walk home, so I’m busing both ways) gives me a bit more time to write on the bus. Which is nice, though I’m finding it harder to get myself to write scenes on the phone than blog posts. I’m not sure why.

We didn’t attend NorWesCon, other than to show up at dinner time on Saturday evening, have dinner with our gang then run up to one of the hotel rooms to watch Doctor Who. But it was a great break during the first weekend that we were actually moving into a place, rather than packing and trying to find a place.

I’ve already written more about the packing, moving, hauling, cleaning, and so on than anyone cares to read, so let’s move on.

The big goals remain, though this is probably a good time to revisit them.

Don’t get mad, get busy. My tasks are: write about things I love; listen to music and audiobooks more and podcasts less; spend at least half of my lunch break writing; set specific monthly writing/editing goals in each check-in; write at least one blog post a month about organizations we can donate to that are fighting the good fight.

Reduce, pack, and prioritize. Now you might think this big goal could be marked “done” for the year, since we’ve moved, but it just needs to be rephrased: Unpack, reduce, and prioritize. We tried to purge a lot of things during the packing, but as we unpack we keep finding things that we realize should have been pitched rather than packed. And though the new place is a couple hundred square feet bigger than the old, we have a lot less storage. So, a lot of work to do here, still.

Take care of us. It’s important to remember to take rests, not to let ourselves stress about things, and so on.

Submit and publish. Initial task was to organize how I’m going to find calls for submission and set reasonable targets for the novel revision/finalization. I have thus far totally failed to get organized regarding submissions. Nearly half the year is gone and I’ve only submitted to two places. I have consolidated all of my notes for the revisions, and now that we’ve moved I can get back to that.

So June is going to be a reset month, now that the big disruption is over. My specific tasks for the month are:

  • Get back into the rhythm of editing the novel.
  • Write at least two blog posts about things I like, rather than rants or commentaries.
  • Get the iris bulbs, monitors, and other things that we want to give away handed off to people who said they wanted them.
  • Go through the rest of the Christmas decoration bins and finish that purge.
  • Write something that isn’t in one of the novels.

Not fooling around with my goals this year!

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“Keep Calm and Achieve Your Goals”
When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to do monthly updates. Mostly because I’ve done a better job achieving those goals during the years that I did the updates. So, how did I do in March?

My specific tasks for March were:

  • At this point it’s time to just pack everything, so pack! We’ve been packing. There are boxes stacked everywhere.
  • Get the new living situation sorted. We’ve contacted a number of property managers, but haven’t gotten a place nailed down.
  • Make reasonable progress on writing/editing knowing that the above is going to eat up most of our available time.I got a small amount done, but not much.
  • Disconnect from the internet at least one night each week. I managed to do this every week!
  • Write at least two blog posts about things I like. I gave myself a lower number for this month because I figured with the packing and trying to find a new place I wouldn’t have as much time to write or blog. I still managed to beat this number by writing four posts about things I like!

My overall goals for the year, where I’m trying to follow the idea of replacing bad habits with better ones:

Don’t get mad, get busy. My tasks are: write about about things I love; listen to music and audiobooks more and podcasts less; spend at least half of my lunch break writing; set specific monthly writing/editing goals in each check-in; write at least one blog post a month about organizations we can donate to that are fighting the good fight.

I did fairly well on this one.

Reduce, pack, and prioritize. We now officially know that we have to find a new place to live this year. We have lots of stuff to go through and decide what to discard and what to pack.

Packing, hauling, getting rid of stuff continued apace. My hubby found a great charity to ship a lot of our books to. That helps me feel better about getting rid of them.

Take care of us. My initial tasks are related to some specific medical things that aren’t urgent, but need to be dealt with. I am going to remain vague on the details of this one.

My husband had his surgery and I tried to play nurse. He’s recovering, and it’s a great relief to get this taken care of before the move!

Submit and publish. Initial task was to organize how I’m going to find calls for submission and set reasonable targets for the novel revision/finalization.

I worked on three submissions. Got one done. I’m frankly amazed at the amount of progress I did make this time given everything else.

Finally, my specific tasks for April are:

  • Pack and move!
  • Pack and move.
  • Squeeze some writing time in somehow.
  • Remember to have fun at NorWesCon (whether we attend the whole weekend or not).
  • Write at least two blog posts about things I like.

Goal-darn age…

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Keep Calm & Achieve Your Goals.
Keep Calm & Achieve Your Goals.
When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to do monthly updates, since the years I’ve done that has resulted in better results than years I haven’t. So, how did I do in February?

My specific tasks for February were:

  • Get through the rest of the bookcases in the computer room. We made progress on the computer room, the bedroom, and the kitchen. We haven’t been sticking to a get-this-whole-bit-finished then move on schedule.
  • Figure out Writers’ Night schedule for at least the following couple of months. Done! Sorted through July.
  • Write at least four blog posts about things I like. I wrote six or seven such posts, depending on how you count.
  • Expand the list of places to find calls for submissions and write one new story. Not done.
  • Finish the current stage of the copy edit pass. Maybe half done.
  • Disconnect from the internet at least one night a week so I can concentrate on writing and editing. I hit the goal, in that every week there was at least one night when I didn’t pay attention to what was going on on the net. A couple of times I was feeling so tired and run down that I came home, ate dinner, and just crashed. So while I achieved the disconnect goal, I didn’t get the writing and editing half of it done each time.

My overall goals for the year, where I’m trying to follow the idea of replacing bad habits with better ones:

Don’t get mad, get busy. My tasks are: write about about things I love; listen to music and audiobooks more and podcasts less; spend at least half of my lunch break writing; set specific monthly writing/editing goals in each check-in; write at least one blog post a month about organizations we can donate to that are fighting the good fight.

Again, I did pretty well on this, with some weirdness because of work and illness eating away at our energy and time.

Reduce, pack, and prioritize. We now officially know that we have to find a new place to live this year. We have lots of stuff to go through and decide what to discard and what to pack.

Making more progress. I didn’t haul as much away the last weekend of the month as the previous three, though.

Take care of us. My initial tasks are related to some specific medical things that aren’t urgent, but need to be dealt with. I am going to remain vague on the details of this one.

We both saw various medical professionals this month as hoped. My hubby’s tests came out good and he has the big procedure scheduled for next month.

Submit and publish. Initial task was to organize how I’m going to find calls for submission and set reasonable targets for the novel revision/finalization.

This was the goal that suffered most from the time squeeze. Not much progress on it at all.

Finally, my specific tasks for March are:

  • At this point it’s time to just pack everything, so pack!
  • Get the new living situation sorted.
  • Make reasonable progress on writing/editing knowing that the above is going to eat up most of our available time.
  • Disconnect from the internet at least one night each week.
  • Write at least two blog posts about things I like.

Goals, damn goals, and resolutions

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When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to do monthly updates, since the years I’ve done that has resulted in better results than years I haven’t. So, we’ve survived the first month of 2017. How did I do?

My specific tasks for January were:

  • While packing away Christmas stuff, reduce the number of RoughTote™ containers full of old ornaments, et al, by at least two. Done! Hauled two loads to Value Village and Goodwill, plus a really big box to a recycler!
  • Figure out Writers’ Night schedule. We’ve got the first two months sorted out, but with all the uncertainty, haven’t quite got the rest of the year done.
  • Write at least four blog posts about things I like. I wrote at least six. Woo hoo!
  • Make a list of places that post calls for submissions. I have a list, but it doesn’t seem long enough. Still, I have a start!
  • Finish the current stage of the copy edit pass. I didn’t quite get through the list of items I had identified for this month, but I got more than half done.
  • Finish going through the bookcases in the computer room, and get through at least one filing cabinet. I did not get as far is this as I hoped.
  • Write at least one blog post about organizations we can donate to that are fighting the good fight. I almost forgot this one because I didn’t list in in the January tasks, but rather as part of one of the over all as a monthly thing. But I did it at nearly the last day, so I’m counting it!

My overall goals for the year, where I’m trying to follow the idea of replacing bad habits with better ones:

Don’t get mad, get busy. My tasks are: write about about things I love; listen to music and audiobooks more and podcasts less; spend at least half of my lunch break writing; set specific monthly writing/editing goals in each check-in; write at least one blog post a month about organizations we can donate to that are fighting the good fight.

I did pretty well on this one. Work has been so busy that I’m often skimping on my lunch break, so not getting that writing time in.

Reduce, pack, and prioritize. We now officially know that we have to find a new place to live this year. We have lots of stuff to go through and decide what to discard and what to pack.

We made progress, but these tasks are always bigger than you think they are.

Take care of us. My initial tasks are related to some specific medical things that aren’t urgent, but need to be dealt with. I am going to remain vague on the details of this one.

We both made progress on this. I feel only a little guilty that half of my accomplishment this month was to nag my husband until he made the appropriate doctor appointments. But I had my own appointments to make and follow-up, so we’re both in this together. I need to find a way to keep the craziness at work from sapping so much of my energy, though.

Because of the deplorable events that Not My President kicked off on Friday, news was so upsetting that on Saturday night I shut down twitter on my laptop, and put my phone and iPad on chargers in another room and made myself work on edits without looking at the internet again until morning. I got through a lot of work, and slept better than I have been for quite some time. So I need to unplug more often, clearly.

Submit and publish. Initial task was to organize how I’m going to find calls for submission and set reasonable targets for the novel revision/finalization.

I have a list to start with. I got through part of my pile of notes on the novel. I think I have a better handle on how much I can get done a month while working on these other tasks.

Finally, my specific tasks for February are:

  • Get through the rest of the bookcases in the computer room.
  • Figure out Writers’ Night schedule for at least the following couple of months.
  • Write at least four blog posts about things I like.
  • Expand the list of places to find calls for submissions and write one new story.
  • Finish the current stage of the copy edit pass. There is a list of unfinished tasks with specific piles of pages of prioritized notes.
  • Disconnect from the internet at least one night a week so I can concentrate on writing and editing.

Unresolved resolution tension

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New Year’s Resolutions are a fraught topic. There is no shortage of posts and articles out there telling you not to make resolutions. Some say to set goals instead. Others talk about how no one ever succeeds at resolutions, so you shouldn’t set them. Others insist that getting out of the mindset of setting resolutions will somehow miraculously make you into the kind of person you want to be, and so on. Then, of course, there are the pedantic jerks who insist it’s all meaningless because the calendar is an arbitrary thing, anyway.

And while I get a good laugh out of the memes declaring that being technically correct is the best kind of correct, I’m also fully aware that one can be technically correct while being completely wrong. It doesn’t matter that it’s arbitrary if you find meaning in it. As Zen Master Unmon asked the monk, “The world is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robes at the sound of a bell?”

A few years back a friend shared her decision to take a lesson she’d learned from training pets and apply it to herself. She identified specific habits she wanted to change, and made her resolution to replace each with a better habit. Since then, that’s how I’ve been setting my annual goals. And for a couple years I also pledged to write monthly reports on this blog of how I was doing. The first year I made very solid progress on two of my four goals, while doing only so-so at the other two. So I set similar goals, one designed to further improve on the two which I had done well with, two slightly different ones to keep attacking the bad habits I had failed to change, and a fourth new goal. Once again, I made good progress on two of the goals, and not so much on the other two. Then last year, for a variety of reasons, I decided not to post my new goals publicly, and not to post the monthly reports.

I’m not going to do a recap of how the 2016 goals went, other than to say that not posting monthly reports led to a much worse success rate last year. I did keep track of my lack of progress, but I have to admit one reason why was each new month I would have the thought that I should make a post about how I was doing on my goals, and then I would remember the reasons I had decided not to do it this last year. I also have to confess that the insurgence of white nationalism and other forms of bigotry that were encouraged by the election did a lot to both distract me from the goals, and contributed to a lot of backsliding.

I have set some goals for the year. I’m going to post them here. I plan to post a monthly progress report. Some parts of this year’s goals are kind of continuations of some of the previous goals, but I’ve trying to change the focus to see if that might help. Each goal has some initial tasks I’m assigning myself to try to foster new habits.

My goals for 2017:

  • Don’t get mad, get busy. It has always been the case that I find it easier to rant and get outraged about injustices and the like in the world than to actually do something about them. It’s going to be really tempting to share links to outrageous news stories, or memes about the outrageous people, and so on during the next four years. Which isn’t going to fix anything. I don’t want to backslide any further from the progress I made with my Reduce the Outrage goal and its sequels, either. My tasks are: write about about things I love, including artwork and writing created by some of the fabulous people I follow; listen to music and audiobooks more and podcasts less; spend at least half of my lunch break writing; set specific monthly writing/editing goals in each check-in; write at least one blog post a month about organizations we can donate to that are fighting the good fight.
  • Reduce, pack, and prioritize. We now officially know that we have to find a new place to live this year. We have some parameters on the timing, though there is still some uncertainty on that front. Last year we did some clearing out of things we don’t use any more. We need to do that more aggressively for the next couple of months. The initial goal is to go through the book cases and filing cabinets and clear out unneeded stuff.
  • Take care of us. Not that I don’t do this, but we both have a tendency to let things slip. My initial tasks are related to some specific medical things that aren’t urgent, but need to be dealt with. I am going to remain vague on the details of this one.
  • Submit and publish. I’ve been in an unending iterative loop of proofing/editing one novel for an embarrassingly long time. I only submitted stories for three calls for submissions last year (and collected three rejections). I need to submit more. I haven’t been able to figure out a reasonable number of submissions to set as a goal, particularly with how much time and energy is likely to be sucked up with the move. So initial task is to organize how I’m going to find calls for submission and set reasonable targets for the novel revision/finalization.

Finally, my specific tasks for January are:

  • While packing away Christmas stuff, reduce the number of RoughTote™ containers full of old ornaments, et al, by at least two.
  • Figure out Writers’ Night schedule.
  • Write at least four blog posts about things I like.
  • Make a list of places that post calls for submissions.
  • Finish the current stage of the copy edit pass. There is a list of unfinished tasks with specific piles of pages of prioritized notes.
  • Finish going through the bookcases in the computer room, and get through at least one filing cabinet.

Groovie g/h/o/u/l/s/ goals

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FunCatPictures.Com
When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year and added some new things. One of the things that I think helped me achieve those goals was writing a monthly report on the blog on my progess. It’s yet again a new month, so here’s the next report!

So, how did I do…? Continue reading Groovie g/h/o/u/l/s/ goals →

There’s goals in them there hills!

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0d9f6b71f2a3c016dea7249cd6b94707When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year and added some new things. One of the things that I think helped me achieve those goals was writing a monthly report on the blog on my progess. It’s a new month, so here’s the next report!

So, how did I do…? Continue reading There’s goals in them there hills! →