Goals, again
Three months ago, my tech job was put on 20% furlough. So, I decided to take that 20% of my time and spend it writing. In those three months, I finished a draft of my tabletop game, Isotope238, wrote three short stories, and launched this Substack. Now my company is back at work. Great news, right? Well, we’ll see.
Intangible goals
A while back, I wrote about my tangible writing goals, and I proposed to measure those goals using coffee cups. I seem to be surrounded by cups, so why not turn them into a unit of measure? Cups of coffee are, after all, much more pleasant and uplifting than centimeters, hours, or even ohms.
The thing is, tangible goals are only half the story, and not even the best half. If you’re going to pour out your time and your creativity, you want there to be reason. Effort without reason is drudgery, and since I already have a job,* I don’t need to spend my leisure time following rules for no reason. What I’m saying is, I already get paid to work to other people’s deadlines and expectations. So, when I’m writing, I get to pick the goals.
Why?
Tangible goals are all about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Intangible goals are about what you’re aiming for. Why have intangible goals? Because they give you something to steer by and provide the opportunity to adjust your course whether you’re achieving your tangible goals or not.
Yes, sometimes you achieve your tangible goals, but you still don’t get what you want.
Here are the goals I’ve set for myself. I reserve the right to revise them at any time.
1. To increase the amount of writing in my life.
2. To be unhurried in how I go about it.
3. To modestly increase my income from writing.
That’s it. Each one is a necessary and hard-won goal. Hundreds of failures and, dare I say, a fair amount of creative disappointment goes into each one of those.
Number 1 is important. It’s a long-term goal. I’m not sure if I can achieve it. Remember how I mentioned that furlough is over? It’s directly cutting down on my writing time. I found out that I like having those extra writing hours. I want them back! This remains an important goal.
Number 2 is for my mental well-being. I want to do ALL the things. I want to write ALL the games. This goal is a reminder to me that when I start to hurry, it’s about to fall apart. Take a breath. Do what you’ve got to do. Write what you can write in the time you have available. Goal number 2 helps keep me happy.
Number 3 is simply practical. If I want to write more in the long term, I need to earn more doing it. This puts some limits on what I work on. Maybe that’s good for me right now, I’m not sure.
That 20% furlough is an important driver of all these goals. Furlough let me test number 1. Living with a reduced paycheck demonstrated the importance of number 3. And number 2? Well, that’s just good mental health practice.
Any of these goals could change. They might turn out to be unrealistic. They might be focusing me in the wrong direction. I don’t know. A month from now I might be writing about how the whole thing fell down and how I’m planning to pick up the pieces. That’s part of the adventure!
Adjusting
Goals are made to be adjusted over time. You don’t want to do it too often, or you might lose your way. But you don’t want to get stuck either. Just like it’s a good idea to check in on your tangible goals, it’s also a good idea to examine your intangible goals. Revisit your goals from time-to-time and figure out if they’re really still working for you.
So, do you have any strategies in your life to re-assess your goals and processes? Do you have any sort of period check-in or journaling practice?