I am coming back to having a daily or weekly mantra or theme. Sure, the year is young but I've been successful with my "portion control" mantra so far in these 5 first days of 2010. I've already lost all my "holiday weight" and am back to my pre-Thanksgiving weight.
Success begets success!
So for the next 3 days, starting today, I'll focus on:
1. Do I consider myself a writer? Why?
2. Where do I want to be published this year? How will I get there?
3. My writing goals for this year: how will I accomplish them weekly/daily?
So this week is about focus and clarifying goals. Starting next week, I'll report back on my success from this week's theme and pose a different theme/ideas for reaching my writing goals for the following week.
Be forewarned: this is fairly ambitious for me, but I realize I need to get the discipline back of weekly "meetings" and hashing about what I could be doing better to improve my "experiment".
It's funny, most of the things I've gone through before always had a definite end -- the PhD, the post-doc, projects with deadlines and product launches where the thing is out of my hands finally. The enormity and chaos of having No Real Deadline (well, other than death) is unnerving. So, setting meaningful obstacles (deadlines) should actually be good.
Everything slides -- that's true -- but eventually the thing, the project, the event, is DONE. But, here's the rub: I should look forward to being done? before I even truly start? Why not? They are just goal posts. Runners visualize the finish line without having had run the full race before... it's all just training.
Creating organization out of all this chaos in my head is really hard. But I chose this life, and in a way I am married to it, so I am going to stick with it now. For better or worse!
