Pathetically Achievable Goals
I had a goal at the start of the year to regularly post to my blog.
I haven’t posted to my blog in a while, and every day I don’t I feel a little bit more worse about it, and so I end up just kind of ignoring it more.
But not today.
Completing goals feels good, especially if you keep a checklist and tick items off when you are done. But that feel good feeling sometimes isn’t enough of incentive to complete your goals.
I find the hardest part to getting stuff done is getting started. The easiest way to getting started is to pick a goal that is really easy, so easy it’s almost impossible to fail and takes minimal effort.
I call these “Pathetically Achievable Goals”.
My Pathetically Achievable Goal for today was to write a blog post simply titled “Pathetically Achievable Goals”. I didn’t even require myself to have any content. Of course, as soon as I started creating the post, suddenly I have a bunch of ideas on what to write about, and I find myself with a couple hundred words.
Here are some examples of pathetically achievable goals that I just made up:
If I haven’t gone for a run in a while:
- Put on running shoes, and just leave the house.
If I need to respond to an email that has been sitting in my inbox for the past week, and I keep avoiding:
- Read the first sentence of the email.
If I need to write an email to someone, and have been procrastinating:
- Write down in your notebook 3 bullet points about what the email will be about.
We will see how well this works out, I hope to keep writing a blog post every few days.
Other the Easter break I went for a walk with some friends to Teufelsberg, a man made mountain with an abandoned NSA station which is now covered in street art. It was a wonderful spring day and walking through the forest felt magical.