The last few months I’ve felt in a rut. Each trial has been an attempt to shift myself out of that feeling. I keep thinking, “if I could just focus on one obstacle and overcome it, things would get back in the groove.” Time and time again, I start to quickly lose interest and try to find a new target. Rather than a large goal being my focus, I’m shifting my attention to the smaller things, my daily routines and habits.
My Five Daily Habits
My daily habits are the following five activities: a morning stretch, reading a page from The Daily Stoic, creating something, reading part of a book, and meditation. Near the end of September, I started letting days go by where I’d complete just one or two of those activities.
Weeks passed and I was still putting off these simple things I set for myself to do. Instead, I thought that if I just focused on one big project, somehow that would help everything fall in place. The reality is that I became overwhelmed keeping up with everything I was trying to juggle at once. As always, hindsight is clear, and I don’t really know what I was thinking.
The stretch and Daily Stoic goal have been an easy thing to mix into a routine. I typically read the page first before going downstairs to make a cup of coffee. Then, I go through the stretch routine while the coffee brews. The other three I once made time for in the day but recently became incidental to decompressing from the workday. Some time after work to let my mind rest has been nice, but it’s often become a slippery slope, as I faced in an earlier trial.
Throughout this year, I’ve frequently questioned the merit and purpose of many of my trials and goals. A question I keep coming back to is do these things line up with even larger goals I have in my life?’ The challenge I’ve faced the past few years is the instability of those long-term goals.
Since thinking on a large scale has led to a failure to complete a number of goals I set out for the short term, my attention, instead, for the next few weeks is going to be on habits. I hope in rebuilding those, I can remake a foundation on which I can start looking further into the future with more clarity and confidence.
Writing
With this in mind, I’ve been torn the past few days whether to continue the challenge I set out for the National Novel Writing Month. Trying to hit 50,000 words isn’t impossible, but I’ve set myself up with a considerable climb to get to that goal. As of this writing, I have a little less than 400 words written.
As mentioned last week, my goal was to use a combination of a word goal each week and a time goal each day. The use of both an input goal (time) and an output goal (words) was intended to help keep momentum while not causing stress each day.
Though my focus is going to be on the five daily goals, luckily one of those involves creating things. I don’t know that this shift is going to allow me to hit 50,000 words, but in the end, I still want to put forward an effort to complete something. The goal I set out for this year was to write a “story” not a novel.
Trying Out Before Buying In 