I love goals. The act of scratching tasks off my to do lists releases my shoulders from my ears little by little with each strikethrough.
For a long time, I tried to force my goals to be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound. But between navigating mental illness and processing grief and trauma brought by a host of gnarly circumstances, I realized that one element of this well-loved paradigm would not work for me: focusing on time.
To be clear, I meet the deadlines and demands of others with no issues, but reaching personal goals has been more difficult, especially when they seem irrelevant or even silly to those around me.
I spent years trying to figure out how long it would take me to achieve a goal without doing the following:
researching and analyzing the smaller tasks needed during the process
practicing these smaller tasks often and long enough for me to know how long it takes to complete them
and creating specific time for reflection
Neglecting these specific elements of the process has led to frustration, anxiety, and low self-confidence. Whenever I failed to fulfill the "promises I made to myself" (my god, the toxic bullshit we fill our own heads with) within a strict yet purely arbitrary amount of time, I often stopped trying. I assumed the goal was wrong instead of my approach toward it.
Eventually, certain goals became so important to me that I naturally released my rigidity around time. Now, if I don't accomplish X in Y number of days, I reset and determine the next right action for me to take.
Right now, I'm in the process of querying agents for my adult cozy fantasy novel Vines and Fire. Starting in late July, I had the plan of querying ten agents every fourteen days until I had sent out one hundred total. I didn't know when I structured this plan that researching and submitting to ten agents would take me around two hours to complete.
After thirty queries sent and seven rejections received, I'm pressing pause. Have I given up? Nope! But it is time to reflect, reread my letter, review my comps, and tighten up anything loose rattling around in my synopsis.
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