I can find a lot of things I’d rather do than write if I’m not feeling it. A lot of things. The internet is chock full of things I can waste time on, so is my computer, or my bookshelf, or anywhere really.
I can procrastinate bad when I’m anxious or don’t know how to move forward. The problem is, I need to find a way to increase my income while working around my home situation. With my time constraints, it’s hard to just find a second job without creating a conflict. My network for side work has dried up due to retirements and economic factors.
I lost a lot of my direction, but I needed to move forward. The first thing was that I had to accept that things were wrong and figure out why it was worth even setting goals. A goal without a purpose is like a song without a melody.
I was able to turn my procrastination into productivity by identifying why I was looking to even set my goals, and then shaping the goals to work for me. By focusing on the difference between the types of goals, I was able to stack my goals to create a scaffold to grow with.
Addressing the Cause
I had used my per hour work I hated as an excuse to procrastinate on what I wanted. Despite the fact blogging (or any side hustle) typically isn’t all that profitable in the beginning, it is at least predictable with a little work. The income got more and more reliable as I stepped up my game, and in doing so it hit on both parts of my anxiety which lead to procrastination.
I solved the frustration of money very slowly, but at a non-negligible rate. More importantly, I found a hobby to absorb myself in. I could slowly digest the anxiety as I worked through something which attacked the underlying cause of the anxiety. The process also taught me new skills and helped me improve myself. The hobby covered the symptoms, the money covered the cause. Each dollar bought dollar of freedom, each idea implemented bought an evening of time.
Goal-Setting
Taking off the blinders can be just as frightening as putting them on in the first place. Goals allow you to have a way to narrow the focus when the blinders come off. Too narrow and you limit yourself, too wide and you get analysis paralysis. If a goal is too short term, you lose consistency for direction, too long term and you lose vision. There has to be a balance. To set those goals, you have to understand what makes up a goal.
Narrow Goals vs. Wide Goals
Narrow goals are limited in their scope while wider goals are much more generic. Learning a language is a wide goal, while drawing a bird in a given art style is a narrow goal. Both types are equally important, but they need to be used in conjunction with each other.
A narrow goal gives you an easy way to achieve a unit of success, but at the expense of it being long term. It is a single step on the ladder. Wide goals are harder to pin down what needs to be done, but gives a continual path forward. If you want to learn a language, you need the narrower goals of learning the grammar, the vocabulary, etc. These goals further break down until you get to individual units of knowledge.
Some people fall in the trap of learning bits of vocabulary but never really working towards anything useful, or learning only vocabulary at the expense of grammar. They’re still making progress towards the wider goal, but without actually making overall progress towards their implied goal of actually learning the language. Narrow goals give context and feedback for wider goals. A tree doesn’t isn’t anything more than an idea without looking at its branches, roots, and leaves. A branch by itself is important to the tree, but is meaningless as a tree.
A wide goal gives a narrow goal a purpose, and a narrow goal defines milestones towards success. The combination of constant milestones and feedback gives a scaffold for success but also to get a more positive process with productivity which helps with anxiety and procrastination.
Short Term Goals vs. Long Term Goals
Not all short term goals are narrow goals, and not all long term goals are wide goals despite what common sense may imply. What is narrow and wide is going to depend on your frame of reference. The same applies to temporal goals, but the axes are not the same.
Learning to draw a bird is a narrow goal, but it would be a long term goal for me because I would need to learn so much to actually reach the end. Someone good at art however may see this as an extremely short term goal. The scope of what is learned is narrow compared to the corpus of knowledge, but the time frame will depend on other requisite skills. The bigger this discrepancy, the more impactful it is on productivity.
Goals and Productivity Versus Procrastination
You can get several combinations between the two sets of skills. The most common are going to be narrow goals lining up with short term goals, and wide goals lining up with long term goals. You can also have wide goals which are short term, and narrow goals which are long term.
Narrow, short term goals and wide, long term goals tend towards being intuitive and organic. A narrow goal which is long term implies lacking knowledge to accomplish the task. I can’t draw a realistic bird to save my life, but I also struggle to draw nice looking basic shapes. Trying to accomplish this sort of goal is typically going to induce more anxiety via stress due to the fact it’s hard to accomplish for a relatively small gain. While this may feed some people, it tends to be a detriment.
Wide goals which are short term are usually due to the opposite. The goal is too easy compared to the level you should be functioning at. This can also mean the goal is too wide without definition. “Learning a language” can mean many things. Is the goal to travel or to read literature? Are you targeting a specific area or to speak the standard language? Opening a store in itself is easy, keeping it running is not.
These types of outliers can induce apathy or anxiety, both of which hurt productivity and progress. When you shoot too high without being realistic about what you need to do first, you make it painfully difficult for a small payoff. When you make it too easy, you reduce the challenge or shoot for too generic a goal.
Redefining Goals
A good intentioned goal which is impossible tends to be worse than a forced goal which is equally impossible. You tie your emotions to the first but probably not to the latter. Your emotions are going to impact your success, for better and for worse. Negativity will beget more negativity, so nip it in the bud.
A good goal should have a purpose, a definition, a way to accomplish it, and a realistic time frame. A purpose gives it a measure of why the work is being done. The definition tells us what it is which can help define success from the outcome. Having a way to accomplish it allows us to actually complete the task and assess what it takes, and the time frame gives us a deadline as well as an estimation for our time.
Split generic goals into practical goals. Don’t just “learn a language”, learn a language for work or for travel, then go deeper. Do you want to hit up restaurants and shops when traveling or go for sites?
I learned Chinese so I could translate and interpret originally. I wanted to focus on business language, but also delve into technology and similar. Despite the fact I have shifted from that original goal, having that framework allowed me to work out a way to get to the original goal and measure progress. Having a concrete idea also allowed me to know where I was when I pivoted goals.
Preventing Goals From Conflicting
Goals can often be used to procrastinate more. Defining a goal defines a measure for success, but it’s easy to make goals conflict. When you have too many vague goals, it’s easy to swap between them accomplishing nothing overall.
Make a concrete order for your goals. When you have a task which is important and has a requirement to work on, it’s harder to just keep procrastinating. I make it a rule to sit in front of my computer for 30 minutes trying to write every day I have time. I might not accomplish anything, but I can’t just “not feel it tonight” anymore either.
By prioritizing goals and focusing on making myself work on the most important goals, I can’t cheat and let my goals conflict. What do you need to do to reach your goals and what is just nice to have? Prioritize accordingly.
Each goal has a level of importance and a queue for if life won’t let me work on what I need to. Worst case, I procrastinate by accomplishing something else, but typically, I just follow the system. Realistic goals mean realistic accomplishments in a realistic way which makes it harder to not feel like there’s success around the corner.
Featured image by Free-Photos from Pixabay