How many of you make New Year’s resolutions? Or goals of some sort, even if you don’t call them resolutions? Hands up!
( Photo credit: Randy Heinitz via Foter.com / CC BY )
I learned a long time ago that making resolutions doesn’t really work for me, so I quit that a long time ago. Instead, I focus my efforts on goals, broken down monthly, and sometimes weekly, and mostly writing-related.
I’ve taken part in a goal-setting workshop the last couple of years with Delilah Devlin and her sister Elle James (which is wonderful, if you’re a writer looking to set better, more achievable goals for yourself). I’ve whittled down my writing ‘wish-list’ each year to something I can actually do, as well as building in time to allow for unexpected things cropping up. But this year, even though my writing output was really good, I had some serious distractions in my personal life pop up that put a huge damper on my achievements. Some of those things, I have mentioned here in previous blog posts, so I won’t go into them again.
So right now, I’m reworking my goals list for the new year while allowing for these big, personal things to still impact my plans (and I already know they will, unfortunately), but still actually achieving my goals.
( Photo credit: Randy Heinitz via Foter.com / CC BY )
Part of my planning is to figure out everything that I want to accomplish, then break down the list by month, and sometimes even by the week within that month depending on what is going on. I started with a pretty good list, but I’ve pared it down a bit, knowing that things that impacted my plans for 2016 will still be ongoing (and possibly bigger goal-killers than they already have been), and I’m fine-tuning now so that by the end of the week, I will be ready to kick 2017’s ass!
( Photo credit: C. VanHook (vanhookc) via Foter.com / CC BY )
How do you work out your plans for the new year? Just a vague list of things you want to achieve, or a day-by-day breakdown of everything you’ll have to do to make it happen? If you share by Friday, December 30, 2016, I’ll put your name in a drawing for an ebook of Hunting Medusa.
