Curious Incidents of a Flailing Mermaid

Goals and Challenges: how many is too many?

I’ve just been reading through the Dear Me letter I wrote at the start of the year. Soon it will be time to write a new one and I wanted to see whether I could still relate to it. It is an interesting read – for me, if no one else. I was particularly interested to see that I didn’t really set myself any goals or challenges. Well, apart from the reading challenge that I failed spectacularly. I wonder whether this is an indication of how much confidence in myself I had, at the time of writing.

I say this because, as we speed towards 2015, I honestly cannot stop thinking of challenges I could set myself. To the point where, I don’t even think I could list them all here if I tried. My brain is just to full.

The thing is, I love competition and challenging myself. I thrive on it. If something doesn’t challenge me, I really struggle to give it my all. Ticking things off and saying “yes! I did it,” gives me such a buzz. On the other hand, I can overwhelm myself very easily. So, if a to-do list is too long, I get overwhelmed and find myself unable to get anything done at all.

Therefore, it is all very well having all these challenges spinning around my head at the moment. But I know full well that if I try and commit to everything, I will end up doing nothing. I just need to remember what I told myself in my previous Dear Me letter: “you don’t have to do everything, all the time!”

Additionally, all the things I want to challenge myself to involve writing. Yes, I very much want to improve my writing and do much more of it in 2015. But, it is important for me to remember that it is not my job (I wish) and I need to keep focus on “real life” too. That said, while I am self-employed and have flexibility in my working life, is a perfect time to get my head down and read and write to my heart’s content.

So, I feel the need to focus my goals and establish a way forward that will not only challenge me, but make productive use of my time – without taking it all up. I already feel like writing this post has made things clearer in my mind.

It is all very well thinking things like, “I want to write 365 blog posts in 2015”. But what if I can’t? I’ll just end up beating myself up and feeling like a failure. Surely it is better to have 50 small challenges than 10 big ones?

A challenge is great. But there comes a point where the fun is lost and it becomes a chore. I think I’ve learnt enough over the past few year to know that that is not what I want or, indeed, need!