Weekly Goals, Weekly 29: Changes Are Hard

Last week was something of a mixed bag.  I had a super productive day on Monday, possibly because I was feeling energized by the book I was reading.  I got several small tasks done, some of which had been on my to-do list for quite some time, as well as some larger tasks.

Tuesday and Wednesday continued fairly productively.  I worked on stuff that mattered to me.  I got lots of writing done and kept up on some things that needed doing.

Thursday is where everything started to fall apart.  I picked up the dog we were dog sitting for the weekend, wrote a blog post, got a little writing done.

By Friday, I was fully in a slump.  I didn't get much of anything done.  Saturday we ran some errands and yesterday we visited a vintage store run by a doll friend on the way to help my mom with some things, so neither day was truly unproductive, but I haven't worked on writing since Thursday so I feel like it was unproductive.

On Friday, I was chalking it up somewhat to the difficulty of reframing my priorities.  In some ways, allowing myself to do what matters most to me allowed me to do nothing for a little bit.  You could probably argue that after house sitting and running the table at Fan Expo, my body was telling me that I needed to rest, and resting for the sake of resting is definitely something the author of Four Thousand Weeks talks about.

But I'm hoping to get back on track this week.

I've been thinking about my long term goals, and how my weekly goals don't necessarily always match up.  Part of that has been how busy we got, of course.  But part of it was also that I'd gotten out of the habit of working on certain projects.

I have three major, long term goals:

1. To keep working on my novels, publish, and develop my career as an author
2. To clean up my house and make the doll spaces more usable
3. To get back to working on dolls, both my own and my clients'

Truthfully, three major goals are a lot to juggle.  I need to be aware of the juggling that having multiple major goals will entail.

One thing I need to think about is an idea that Four Thousand Weeks proposes: that when you're working toward a major goal, it may be helpful to temporarily shelve everything else and focus just on that task or project.  I think I may need to do that with cleaning up the house and working on the doll room, but the question is, how much to shelve?  I don't necessarily want to put off writing every day, and of course there are a lot of necessary tasks that I can't put off.

What it comes down to is that I need to eliminate distractions such as social media, which tend to suck me in and keep me scrolling, wasting time that I could otherwise be using on either writing or working on the doll room.

So this week's goal is actually going to be something entirely different:

1. Work on minimizing distractions

Of course, I have secondary goals, things I want to work on in that time I'm taking back from my distractions: in this case, writing and working on the doll room.  But I want to keep minimizing distractions as my main goal, because I don't want to lose sight of that as I go throughout my week.