Scattered goals
Life can often feel overwhelming, can't it? With so many aspects to juggle—from Academics or work to personal growth and self-care—it’s easy to feel scattered. But what if I told you that getting your life together doesn’t have to be a daunting task? Instead, you can approach it slowly, piece by piece.
Is it not true that most of us aim to start big? Change is slow, too slow. Coming from an impatient person, believe me working towards something everyday without being rewarded with significant results can be a huge downer. So what do we do? We try and juggle everything all at once. Especially during New year’s time many of us get a sudden surge of inspiration. All of a sudden everything seems 'not good enough.’ You have to better your academic performance, you have to achieve your fitness goals and you have to build better relationships all at the dawn of January 1st. This is such a common tendency that when we draft our resolutions we end up writing down fantastic, almost impossible goals, all of which we want immediate results for.
Consistency with motivation
Now what better example to give than my own? So yes, at the start of the year I got the same urge to better everything I possibly could. What did i do? I made a very complicated, minute to minute weekly timetable for myself. Was it practically possible? No way. But while on my self-confidence high, I was so sure that I’d be able to do it all that I went ahead and set impossible standards for myself. Now since I've decided to call myself out on it, let me admit, 3 days into the first week I was burnt out. Perhaps some of you have experienced similar situations, but in my case this wasn't the first time.
Now this may come across as a miserable attempt, or a failed experiment of mine, but in fact it turned out to be quite the opposite. Sometimes disappointment clears a new perspective for you and that's exactly what happened to me. What I think most of us forget to factor in is the fact that improvement does not happen overnight, and motivation that only comes in spurts of 2-3 days isn't really motivation. It’s natural to feel most motivated on such occasions but many of us lack the consistency in motivation.
Inspiration and drive can help you identify your goals and aspirations, but they can only get you so far. The rest of the way your motivation and dedication towards these goals will carry you. Generally we end up putting pressure on ourselves to work at our best, and when success isn't as evident as we’d like to be it seems as though you're at a dead end. But why is it that we only get this far? Why is it that this is the point where most people stop trying? In my opinion, the larger the burden you put on yourself the larger the disappointment you have to bear and thus the more inevitable failure becomes.
Forming new patterns
So why not break our patterns to avoid falling into this vicious cycle? Why not make alterations to the process itself and discard the impulsiveness of our goals to make them more achievable? By this point in the article you may be expecting an answer to all the questions I've brought up, and although I can’t offer apt solutions for all the complexities of this issue, I can make a suggestion derived from personal experience.
Firstly fix your focus on one aspect of your life, something that you want to improve on. Keep in mind that you have plenty of time, 365 whole days to work on other things and put them aside for the time being. If schedules give you confidence and structure make them (If not, you can even just write out a list but for example sake I’ll be using a schedule). Put everything on the schedule, everything you'd want to work on and ensure that you're giving yourself enough leeway and flexibility to skip things or alter them. Again for the time being pick just one activity off that schedule. Now secondly, for a given period of time, be it a week, 2 weeks or a month, blindsight everything else on that schedule and put all your efforts and attention towards that one thing.
Once you've done that, all that's left to do is follow that particular scheduled activity for that period of time. Make it a point to consistently and diligently do that activity every single week. Keep it flexible, but even if it means compromising on other task ensure that that activity is your priority. And once that activity has settled into your schedule and has formed a habit, pick up another one off of the same schedule. Lastly, repeat this process for all activities one by one while maintaining consistency in previously worked upon activities as well and over time you'll start adhering to the whole originally made schedule.
Why this particular process? Well I specifically recommend this process because it’s rewarding in the short term as well as long term. Consistency with one activity is also significantly rewarding and eventually when you settle into your preferred schedule you'll achieve your long term goal. This may seem like a very silly process, but in my experience it’s truly effective and helps you space out your goals while still working on them, all the while giving yourself space for error.
Conclusion
The general key to this technique according to me is to keep things flexible and not too rigid. Take plenty of breaks and change it up sometimes while effectively setting your priorities towards your goals. Eventually the signs of improvement will be explicit and rewarding.
Improvement is a slow and tedious process for which the results require utmost patience, but it’s crucial to remember that everyday that you get up and do something, counts. Your efforts are contributing to your goals whether visibly or not and to keep making these efforts while cutting yourself some slack is the best possible way to put things together piece by piece.
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