Tag: Personal experience

We’re ending the second week of January and I’m just now writing one of these posts. Procrastination 101, guys!

Though, giving myself time to think about what I want to do and if I can do it was helpful. If we were having coffee, I’d complain about the silliness of making resolutions and why they don’t work for me.

I set goals that are too big!

The timeline for a resolution is in the name. A YEAR. Huge right? …not! But my idiot self will set goals so big that it takes a ton of time to complete them. When anything is too daunting for me to do, I procrastinate and it’ll be too late by the time I get to them.

Life gets in the way.

This is how I interpret my reality: there’re the things I want to do and then there’s life. Life doesn’t care about my ambitions; in fact, it doesn’t care I exist. It does what it wants!

So when life happens, my resolutions slip out of focus (what’s more important: building an author platform or figuring out how to pay that bill you don’t have money for? Exactly. The platform bill).

To be fair, this is true for any goal. Finding a balance in our lives is a part of being human.

Resolutions? More like a wish list.

This is the main issue. My resolutions don’t acknowledge my reality. I give no thought on how I will complete my goals only that I want to (Write 50 books in a year? Hell yeah! Wait…).

I also forget that things don’t happen cause I want them to. Like, just because I want to get published in every magazine doesn’t mean that editors are going to collective think: Oh, this writer is ambitions and wants to be published in my magazine. I can see she has a ton of talent and is a goddess on the page. Let’s publish her! 

Nope. 🙁

So what’s a girl supposed to do?

I stopped making resolutions. It became disheartening to finish a year without accomplishing anything I set out to do.

But…I’m trying again this year with a twist. I’ve made doable quarter goals (January – April) with realistic expectations. My goals are:

1. Read 2 Books (1 every two months)
2. Freewrite for 15 minutes a day (total 1635 minutes or 27 hours)
3. Post daily except on Sundays (total 91 posts)
4. Out of bed by 8am 50% of the time
5. Outline and Draft “Drowning in Your Sins” (a web serial 🙂 )
6. Obtain a driver’s license
7. Create a newsletter

I did something like this in 2016 and all I had to do was complete half of them. So that’s 3-4 goals for this quarter.

In case you’re curious, my 2018 “resolution” was to be fearless. Here’s what I accomplished:

• I learned to play the piano
• I earned two degrees
• I’ve let others read my work (poetry and flash)
• I bought the “Inky Tavern” domain name
• I made some awesome friends
• I held onto a job
• I redesigned my blog so that it accurately represents me as a writer

Wish me luck and see you in the next coffee share!