Weekly Goals, Week 28: Changing My Outlook

I'm currently reading a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.  As the subtitle suggests, the book is about how limited our time is, and is a counter to the obsession with productivity.  It's making me rethink how I'm planning my goals every week.

I'll write a full review when I'm finished reading, but for now, suffice it to say that I'm reassessing how I manage my time.

Last week, of course, was absurdly busy, partly due to house sitting and partly because of Fan Expo Denver..  I posted my goals post for the week late, and also posted about our table for the Denver region of NaNoWriMo at Fan Expo.

While the con was busy, it was also a lot of fun.  We had two panels where we talked about NaNoWriMo and writing novels, and the rest of the time my husband and I traded off working the table with one of our other local organizers.  I'm super jazzed about working on my novel after all that, and looking forward to the weekly year-round write-in tomorrow, since we had a few people at the con who expressed interest in coming.

This week will be my first "regular" week in about three weeks, and maybe my first week without as many distractions in a long time: My husband started his new job today, and will be in the office four days a week for the first couple weeks (three days a week after that).  It'll be an adjustment and I do miss him being home, but I think I may find that not having him here will enable me to get more done.

I'm trying not to focus too much on rigid productivity, though, and instead consider the value of the things I'm trying to make time for.  One of the most important points of this book is that no matter how productive we are, we'll never have time for everything, so it's important to choose instead what we value most and make sure we do those things.

With that in mind, and noting that I'm not done with the book yet and haven't decide for sure how it will apply to my daily outlook, my goals for the week are as follows:

1. Work on my novel every day
2. Finish unpacking and cleaning up from the last two weeks
3. Reassess what's most important to me and rethink my goals

This morning, I went through a bunch of my tasks that I've been rolling over each week for weeks, sometimes for months.  The number of tasks was getting out of hand!  I deleted anything that wasn't super important to me or that had been there for far too long.  The important things that were left, I tried to make some time for, in both this week's schedule and next week's.  There are some tasks that I deleted that will probably get recreated at some point, but ideally when I have more time to do them, as they aren't things I'm likely to forget about.  Having so much tasks to roll over each week was stressing me out, as it made me focus on all the things I couldn't accomplish.

I'm trying to remember, as I go into this week, that my time is finite, and there's only so much I can do with it.  Nothing is served by me feeling guilty for not having accomplished things I think I should have; most of the time, I legitimately didn't have time for it, and I know that.  Things like deleting less important tasks and rolling over less every week will help me not feel so guilty about things beyond my control.