I used to be really into New Year’s resolutions. Also, lofty goals and all manner of similar endeavors that look good on paper but inspire disappointment and self-criticism in real life. It felt good to tell myself — and the people around me, let’s be real — I was an ambitious person. The sort to set impressive goals and achieve them.
To offer an update several months later, not so much.
And that’s the rub with ambitious goal-setting. Maybe it works for some people, but it’s never really worked for me. I’ve achieved a lot of ambitious things in my life. Whether I can draw a line between an achievement and a specific goal I’d set previously has always been a coin toss.
Let’s lower the bar
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve refined my approach to work habits and goal-setting. I don’t set impressive goals anymore. I don’t even set respectable goals. And I certainly don’t sign onto a challenge like Dry January just because it sounds virtuous and everyone else seems to be doing it. Instead, I expect of myself only what I could give on my worst day.
Dry January is not that, and neither is drafting an entire book in thirty days. Maybe I’m too old and tired to engage in a time-bound challenge like this for the hell of it. I don’t know. What I do know is this January, I’m challenging myself to write fifty words every day and seeing how that goes.
That’s right, five-zero fifty. A rate of production at which, if one is lucky, one could draft a full novel in approximately two thousand days (or five and a half years). However, I’ll bet all of you right now I will finish my next novel well in advance of that. I actually might finish it before June — this June, to be clear. That’s the magic of lowering the bar.
If I feel like I’ll fall short, I probably won’t try
Part of my fussiness around goals has to do with my having ADHD. In fact, I just dropped an episode of my Audioblogs podcast about long-term goals and projects and why ADHD people struggle so hard with them. My brain is like a computer with insufficient RAM: I can only fit one or two moving parts in my head at once. This makes it monumentally difficult to conceptualize complex or multi-step plans. Add in severely impaired time perception and you get an endless supply of exciting, ambitious goals with a very limited capacity to define a path forward.
ADHD aside, I also think — and bring up in that Audioblog — the more ambitious the goal, the more external variables you have. My most inspired goals have almost always relied on some combination of stars aligning in my favor. This means I can give as much as anyone could ever ask of me on a project, and yet still fall short of my goal.
As someone who has struggled with ADHD, perfectionism, and self-criticism my entire life, this is a recipe for demoralization. As soon as I think I might not meet my goal, I lose motivation to try at all. I see it even with the activity rings on my Apple Watch. Logically, I know a ten-minute yoga video will do me good no matter what. Yet if I suspect it won’t get me over the line to close my Move (calorie burn) ring that day, I feel like I shouldn’t do it.
When all the year’s goals come down to December, and December says, “Hold my beer”
As I wrote in my Write Life email last week, I had a rough December. By “rough December,” I mean — for our purposes here, at least — a month in which I felt incapable of making progress on my book drafts. I’d wanted to complete at least two new book drafts by the end of 2022. December was my last chance, and to meet that goal I would’ve had to pull out all the stops.
I was not in a headspace to pull out any stops.
Predictably, this led to me shelving not one, not two, but three projects-in-progress for the entire month of December. I couldn’t put in the work I needed to.
Did I really have to buckle down?
I will entertain the possibility this break was indeed necessary and healthy. What I will not accept is the idea I needed to buckle down and make up for lost time in order to meet some arbitrary goal. I did not need to do that work. I thought I did, and that led to me doing nothing instead of something, which in turn made me feel even more behind.
See where I’m going with this? Sometimes I have external deadlines. Those are a different beast. This was not one of those times.
In hindsight, I think I fell into the big-goal trap again because deep down, I’m still nursing the wounds of 2020. Between March 2020 and June 2021, I assumed primary responsibility for our household’s pandemic response. This included managing communication with extended family, working around supply chain issues, and overseeing virtual school. It feels like it set me two books behind, and that hurts.
What about my goals can I control?
The time many of us lost during those dark first eighteen months of the pandemic is just that: lost. My life will not part in the middle to make space for the kind of buckling down making up for lost time would require. Expecting myself to produce such a miracle without somehow adding hours to the day and days to the week is similarly unreasonable.
The pandemic was only an extreme example of a more bland truth: life happens. Sick kids, aging parents, job changes, marriage crises, friends in need, and, yes, global pandemics and ecological collapse. We might be able to write a thousand words in a half hour, but that doesn’t matter if we have to evacuate our home for a flood or wildfire. Sometimes life limits the hours we can spend at the writing desk, or in service to whatever goal we’ve set for ourselves.
When this happens, I firmly believe we need to be able to succeed in our goals anyway. Otherwise we’ll struggle to keep going at all. For me, this means casting out arbitrary timelines to finish my next book and instead thinking in terms of time allocation. Of my total time in the office, at my desk, what percentage am I spending on long-form writing projects? This is something I can control, even when that time grows short.
Making the magic happen, in fifty-word increments
My current strategy to up that percentage is to set absurdly low word-count goals. Hence January’s fifty words per day. Except it’s not really fifty words per day, because even on the days when I try to stick to fifty words just to see if I can, I find I cannot. I don’t think I’m capable of writing only fifty words once I’ve sat down to write more than one.
And that’s the magic right there. Fifty is the magic number that will bring me to the big scary Word document no matter how crappy I feel that day. Once I’ve opened the document and found a spot to start typing, the words — always more than fifty of them — will follow.
For me, success needs to be defined by consistent efforts. Efforts I can control. Goals need to feel gentle and approachable, carrying a cost of admission my tired brain is willing to pay. This approach might not sound impressive to tell people about at a party — or in this blog post — but it inspires consistent work and achievement.
I’m almost certain I will write more in the first six months of 2023 than I did in the final six months of 2022. If I do, I will credit this to my decision to switch my goal from “finish two books” to “write fifty words a day.”
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