The Confusatory

Do, or Die Trying?

(I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss Publish It Tuesday two weeks in a row: I’ve already got a sack of guilt on my shoulders from last week’s intentional miss. Luckily, Andy’s piece on goals and preemption got me thinking…)

I’m terrible at personal goals. They languish in Things for months, constantly de-prioritized for more immediate, more urgent, more enjoyable projects and ideas. Worse than that, once I do find some traction, they get preempted for just about everything: drinks with friends, parties, running, videogames, reading, surfing about on the internet without end. Like Andy, I’ve found scheduling useful: even if I don’t box out my own evening in iCal, thinking about my evening throughout the day as, “Sweet, gonna work on that project tonight!” is enough mental momentum and forethought to usually dodge distractions.

With regards to social distractions, I think there’s a bigger phenomenon at hand, and it deserves a mention: “fear of missing out”. A highly-connected world makes you feel that much more disconnected and anxious when you do something alone. There’s so much social potential at your fingertips, it feels weird to not exploit those nodes to keep your brain amused and entertained with other people.

I’ve found that guilt and high expectations aren’t good motivators. Nothing makes you less inclined to work on a project than reminiscing about how you’d thought of it four months ago and still haven’t done much more than git init a folder for it. And again, like Andy, I’ve found external anchors useful. Making a deal to write every Tuesday, well, makes me write every Tuesday, even if I’d rather be yak-shaving my OmniFocus library into shape.

But, there’s something else to personal goals that I find far more difficult: I struggle with letting go. It’s so, so difficult to look at OmniFocus, go, “You know what? Fuck that. I’m never doing that.” and delete an item outright. My brain dislikes lossy systems, so intentional disposal of previous thoughts seems like a shame. “It was once a good idea!”, it screams. “Remember, you had it!”. Like everything else, the only way to get good at it is to practice it, so I think one of my projects this week is to figure out what I really want to do. Once I have that in front of me, I just might have enough tricks up my sleeve to start doing them.

• Publish it Tuesday