Staying with the New Year’s resolutions
January 3rd, 2007I found a good trick for making progress with the daily New Year’s resolutions: don’t go online until they are complete.
Another lesson I have learned already is to do the tasks as early in the day as possible. It is easy to procrastinate, and then at some point it becomes too late to do anything.
Another one of my resolutions is to write a bit of fiction each day. To keep it simple, I’m starting with a children’s story. This is a lot of fun.
. . .
January 4th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Hey Karl,
It’s been a while since I visited. Love the look. Nice mix of fonts. Care to email me your style sheets?
But germane to your post, I too have certain rules about resolutions:
First, aim high. I don’t go in for conservative resolutions. One will never exceed a target, so make it big.
Second, date the goals; i.e. “By what exact date will this be done?”
Third, determine the monthly, weekly and daily aspects. I want to get the cut back into my muscles. That means three days of aerobics and three days of weight training each week.
Fourth, make stat sheets and logs. I want to do at least two hundred drawings for my book. I’m giving myself six months. That’s 33 drawings a month, 7.6 drawings a week. But more drawings would be better. So I have graph paper with daily and weekly stats. I also very precisely define what constitutes a completed work, so the drawing must be “qualified” before it gets recorded; otherwise, one gets a sheer quantity measure with no measure of excellence. At times in the past I’ve used somewhat complicated point systems, but these days I just use estimated dollar value to cover the quantity/quality modulus.
By doing the above last year, I was able to write some six hundred thousand words in less than four months. No kidding. Really. that’s only 5k a day, and I was cranking out sometimes 14k by the end of the run, I got so fast. (I’d done over a year of research before that though, so I had a lot of imaginary scenarios and a vast pile of data in my mind before the writing, so the writing was more of an performance than work.)
There’s something about the logs and stat sheets that are highly motivational for me, and it helps me therefore achieve stiff targets because I’m always trying to outdo previous efforts.
Cheers, and good luck… No, power to you.
January 4th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Grr. I see that my list formatting has gotten hosed — making my comment hard to read. Too bad you don’t have the “Edit Comment” feature, so I could fix the formatting.