Only The Curious

There were two really great blog posts in my inbox today, both of which left me feeling better about my life and the way I’m running it.

Matt Chevy wrote about focus. Sort of. Really he wrote about priorities. He talked about how time and time again he’s set himself up to do things – write 500 words a day for his book or write a blog post every day for a month – but then fizzles out well before the task is completed, because he gets overwhelmed and it starts dragging him down. I was relieved to hear I’m not the only one who does this, often over and over again. Just this morning I woke up thinking about the fact that my 30th birthday is this month and I’ve only done about half of the things on my 30 before 30 list.

He came to the conclusion that it’s important to focus on your priorities, and not worry about the things that are taking time and energy and weighing you down. If they’re really important you’ll get to them, and if they’re not, then it doesn’t really matter if they happen, does it?

I left his post feeling okay about not doing all of my 30 things. In reality, I’ve done a whole bunch of other epic things this year I couldn’t have planned for myself, and I might have missed out on them if I’d decided, for example, that I needed to stay home and write more instead of going rock climbing for the first time. My resolution is to follow my energy – what’s flowing, what’s working, and what I’m getting excited about – and not let my worries over my unwritten book keep me from getting things done. I’m going to trust that when the time is right, the energy will start flowing for those things.

Then I opened up Peneolpe Trunk’s post. Sometimes I think she’s brilliant and sometimes I think she’s crazy, (she’s both) but she’s always a good and thought-provoking read. She talked about several things in her post, but the one that stood out to me was the idea of decision fatigue, and how people only have so much capacity for decision making on a daily basis. At a certain point we tire of figuring things out. I think this is why my boyfriend and I fight the most right after work – when we’re both burnt out from the day and something as simple as deciding what to make for dinner can provoke us into hostile miscommunication and anger.

This is also why I’m most productive in the morning, despite the fact that I’m not a morning person. Being self-employed and working alone means I have to decide what I do with every minute of my day – how I do it, where I do it, and ideally, why I’m doing it. By about 2pm I’ve got three free hours and a list of things to do, and by that point I’m usually tempted to call my mom and let her pick, or make a list and pull one of my possibilities out of a hat.

It makes sense that overwhelm and overcommitment aren’t just about time – maybe there’s time to do all of it, but is there energy? Mental capacity? Focus? Decision-making ability? I think both of these posts really get to one point: simplify. Figure out what’s most important, what will have the greatest impact on reaching your goal, and do that first. Don’t let anything else distract you. Don’t worry about what you aren’t doing. Then if you’ve got anything left in the tank, you can start writing your book, or learning spanish, or deciding what to make for dinner.

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My brother and I were enrolled in a martial arts program as kids. It did a lot of great things for us, but I think the most important part of it for me was learning how to set goals. Because we were always working toward earning a black belt with many levels in-between, we were constantly thinking in terms of both long- and short-term goals. Not to mention the books we had to read and essays we had to write prior to our black belt test.

Goals are something I didn’t realize the value of until fairly recently. I was talking with a friend who had never really thought about setting goals; nobody had ever encouraged him to do anything more than just whatever made him happy. While I’m not discrediting this (I often find myself admiring the Zen-ness of the way he directs his life) I have seen him struggle to make decisions about his life.

Whenever I have a difficult decision to make, (which is often, because as an ENFP, I see just about every option available to me in every situation) I find that the best way to make the decision is to work backwards. But this only works if you have an endpoint to work from. When you know where you’re trying to go, figuring out the best way to get there is easy. It’s when you don’t know the destination that choosing a route becomes impossible.

Goals keep us on track. It can be easy to get distracted, and while it’s always good to remain open and try new things, if I have a goal in mind, it’s easy to see which option moves in the direction of my goal, which ones are neutral, and which ones run in direct opposition.

I was inspired to write this post thanks to my friend Rebecca Thorman (author of Modite), who put out a challenge to fellow bloggers recently to participate in a monthly goal meet-up. The idea is that each month we post our personal and career goals on our blogs, to help one another with setting and achieving said goals.

Last month I achieved one of my longest-standing goals, which was to move out to Colorado. Because of all the changes this inevitably brings, I feel like I’m cheating a little bit in setting some of my goals for September, but here they are:

1. Get a job in Colorado
2. Get an apartment near said job
3. Start soliciting freelance work again
4. Get back into exercising at least 3x/week
5. Start playing my guitar again (it’s been over a month!)

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