If you can remember back to yesterday you will see that I set myself 5 goals for the day. Now that it is time to reflect I can say that I achieved the first three goals and not the last two.
I completed the first half of the day pretty much exactly how I planned. After I wrote the blog post on here I wrote three strategy articles. After that I went to the gym and did some grocery shopping. I came home and had dinner and chilled out for a little while. It was about 7:30pm by this stage and was about the time things started going down hill.
I didn’t get any more real work done after this point. When it was getting later on in the evening at about 10pm I had a killer pain in my right temple. I put this down to dehydration, crappy diet and general well being. I went to bed with the plan of getting up at 6am but didn’t wake till midday.
What yesterday proved to me was quite a few things. One was that I can’t live such a ridiculous lifestyle and still work as hard as I need to. The second is that I always set myself stupid goals. When I fail to hit my goals on a regular basis I lose confidence and get down on myself. I am the harshest critic I have. So I have a new plan of attack that is different than “I am going to write 10 pieces of content!!!”
Setting Realistic Goals
The point I want to make here is that even though I tried to write the 10 pieces of content yesterday I really was setting myself up for failure. I haven’t even written 10 pieces of content in a day before and recently have been writing significantly less than that.
So my new approach is goiong to be different. My end goal is to be writing 10 pieces of content in a day, but I know I am not quite there yet. So my goal is to improve on the previous day’s efforts each day. This way I will gradually be able to build up my work load until I get to the point where I can be happy with what I have done.
What I like about this plan is that I won’t constantly be feeling like shit because I haven’t hit my 10 pieces of content. All I’m doing is bettering myself. If we can better ourselves each day; that is something to be proud of right? This might seem like a cheap way out but this is what it is going to take to get to where I want to be at.
I was also just talking to Giorgio on Skype about my goals as well. He came up with some great points about using Google Calendar and breaking my day up into different segments. The constant feeling of “oh man I need to pump out all this content” can be a bit disheartening. So if I schedule in other work like SEO I can get a break from the monotony of the work. Sure the content is a high priority; but forcing myself to do it now at all costs hasn’t been working out for me as yet.
I have some great ideas for blogging topics that go outside the realm of how my day went. I am going to write my first one up right away.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
When I realize that I won’t be achieving a goal I have set myself, I change it before my deadline in order to get lessen the fail.
I basically keep a list of small tasks the should be done, like “write article about x” or “find subjects for 10 articles for site x”. Each of these tasks is very doable, and I get a lot of satisfaction from being able to cross them off the list.
Whenever I realize that I’m not going to be doing one of the things on the list today, I reschedule it to the next day (or another day, as long as it is a specific time), and if I can’t think of a time to do it, it either goes to a “todo someday” list or simply gets deleted.
Yeah you make some good points there. I have that mindset of “I have to do this now or else”and if I don’t get it done then I feel like I’m letting myself down.
If I can make goals that are more realistic to begin with – then I won’t have that much trouble.
If I do run into some trouble though I will make sure I reschedule before the day’s end by putting it into my calendar. Great tip!
I was in the same shoes by setting up unrealistic goals for a day and when I couldn’t achieve it, I felt crap, I felt that I am just a loser who cannot make these simple tasks.
Recently I installed a task manager to my server where I can write down my notes (as Unknown webmaster said: write article about x and y, restructure the homepage for a new promo, make a new peel ad, etc.) and I categorized them into groups like: content writing, design, programming, link exchange, others, etc..
This way when I’m fed up with content writing (and I’m sure that one has the limit to pump out quality content (and we want conversions right?) so I just stop, because I know that I can force myself to write another piece but that won’t be that good and engaging than other contents. I know that my content writing limit at the moment 3/day, maybe 4, but I just can’t write more good content a day because of my brain emptying lol.
The task program I use: http://www.getontracks.org, it is built after the GTD method of David Allen and I find it quite helpful.
I must be simple. I downloaded the file and extracted and just got a bunch of folders without an install option
It’s built in Ruby, you need to make sure your server can handle Ruby if it’s set to Php, might need a proxy for Apache (Mongrel) but you can use it locally too, read the Manual menu on the website, they give instructions.
I choose this over others because I just wanted a simple task manager, I used dotproject too, just I didn’t like the design (dotproject.org), but that is easier to install (and can handle time tracking too that is missing from Tracks).
I think it has been movd to dotproject.net