My Year Without Goals: Quarter 1 Check-In

Do I regret not making goals for the year?

When the year began, I wrote about my quest to remove myself from my insistent need for the quantifiable, SMART goals by which I defined my success or failure as a human. By all those measures, I kept failing as a human, even though by the measures that mattered, I’d gotten wiser, become a better writer, and learned to work with my neurodiversity instead of fighting it.

Plus, like, survived parenting two kids during the various global crises that have defined their lives so far.

Anyway, for 2022, I didn’t make goals, didn’t make plans, don’t have checklists of things I must accomplish this year. I decided to ask questions of myself instead.

How has it gone, now that a quarter is fully over? Well.

Unfortunately, this worked. It ended up being the right choice for me in myriad ways, not least because the first quarter threw curveballs at me I couldn’t have possibly imagined. Some of them are great, and some less so, but I’m so glad I didn’t hold myself to what I thought life was like three months ago.

Things that weren’t part of the plan

A short list of things I hadn’t anticipated in December 2021:

• Some agents that had been closed to querying since I started querying my last finished book opened, leading me to send out a few more queries instead of looking into small presses.
• My usual January 10th deadline for a recurring client got moved to February 15th, and my early April deadline moved to mid-April. My usual ebb and flow was interrupted.
• I created my own Medium publication dedicated to the fiction writing tips I’d thought about exploring in a book.
• Instead of just thinking about it, I decided to officially pursue self-publishing my Enchantress book, which has meant some admin work I didn’t expect.
• A friend who had been a major part of my productivity system over the last few years stepped away for a bit for some Real Life stuff, leaving me in need of a new system.
• After a bit of flailing, I found a few new systems for helping myself manage my ADHD and productivity.
• Oh, and I dealt with quarantine, covid scares, actual covid, closed daycares, and non-covid illnesses that threw my non-essential timelines to the wind.

Suffice it to say I’m glad I didn’t officially have goals, because they would have gone very poorly. When my goals go poorly, I get frustrated with myself, and think I need to be doing a better job. I commit to try harder and do better, when trying harder would have done absolutely nothing to, for instance, change the fact that my deadlines moved.

The questions I answered

I asked myself thirteen questions for the first quarter of the year. Of those, eight of them were related to work and side hustles, and the remaining five were related to routines and self-care.

I definitively answered five of them, explored another seven, and set aside two (one after exploring it first) as something I thought I wanted but didn’t — at least not yet.

The ones I definitively answered aren’t interesting. I find this fascinating, because I think it shows me what I was missing in only having SMART goals for the past 15+ years.

What one-on-one work had my focus and time? The work that was sent to me, of course. How can I get Enchantress ready to print out for revisions, and what do I need to know before handwritten revisions can start? I used the same techniques I have for years and managed both parts of this question by mid-February. Do I want to keep querying? Yes, but only to agents I’d already said I wanted to and only just got the chance.

Takeaway: Questions with concrete answers were close to how I used to do goals. They needed my focus to keep me on track with balls that were already rolling, but I didn’t learn anything exciting answering them.

The questions I dropped

I asked two questions that I decided to release from my radar, one without trying and one after trying a bit. The first was “Are there reputable small presses that work in the niche of my last book that I want to query?” The second was “Is there a kind of marketing I don’t find awful, and how can I leverage that for my course?”

As to the first, querying agents again was more important, and then I decided to focus my attention on the Enchantress book while I wait to hear back at publishing’s notoriously glacial pace.

The second I worked on for a bit in weeks when I was less busy. I explored creating a newsletter, preparing short courses with smaller questions, and new pop-up campaigns for my website. All of it I’ve postponed. For one thing, I got a small answer: while there may be marketing I don’t hate, I don’t find any of it enjoyable enough to focus on consistently, the way that initial marketing campaigns need.

I’d love to get my newsletter (which exists here, just without a publishing schedule yet) off the ground, I’d love to write those courses… but unfortunately my day job is more important still, and this isn’t the kind of thing I’d work evenings and weekends for. Also, the dream would be to hire someone to handle my marketing. Maybe one day.

Takeaways: When things change, let them change. Sometimes the worst thing you can do is make yourself follow through with something you no longer want, and releasing it will feel good. Don’t force yourself to do something you hate. Even proven techniques don’t go all that well if you don’t enjoy doing them — that drudgery shows up on the page.

The most interesting lessons are in the maybes

By far, the most rewarding, interesting work I completed in the first quarter didn’t come with easy answers. Most of these questions didn’t come with answers at all, or an item I could successfully check off a to-do list. This is why I consider my experiment to be a huge success. Interesting things happen when you aren’t working toward a specific answer.

These questions included:

• How many articles do I want to write each month? What publications can I submit to?
• How do I feel when I prioritize active self-care (yoga, strength training, gymnastics, etc.)?
• How do I feel when I prioritize stillness in self-care (yin yoga, journal, color, draw, piano, etc.)?
• What does it look like to clean up while making dinner?
• What routines can I create to help me clean well and finish projects?
• How do I feel when I drink at least 64 oz of water a day?

First off, a confession. I lied. I got a sort-of answer to the last question and I don’t like it. Turns out when I drink 64 oz of water a day, I’m thirsty. It isn’t enough. But as someone who was barely managing 24 oz of plain water a day two years ago, I’m happy with the direction this is going. It made it to the interesting part of my list because I expected an answer like “clearer focus” or “I sleep better,” not “I need more than that.”

Beyond water, while I do have some tentative answers and/or definite no’s, what I love about these questions is how they stretched me in directions I didn’t think of when I wrote them.

In January, I hired a personal trainer for six sessions. I was excited to learn how to lift weights, and maybe move that practice to a gym so I could keep up the strength training I started in physical therapy last fall, trying to fix a knee gymnastics broke two decades ago. Unfortunately, my personal trainer knew exactly what I needed and exactly how to work with me. I didn’t think I’d still be seeing her four months later, but I am. So, strength training has ended up as a huge priority for me. I feel amazing when I do it. It’s been easier for me to stick to than yoga ever has.

When I asked questions about publications for Medium, it hadn’t even crossed my mind to make my own publication. But there isn’t really an active publication here dedicated to fiction writing advice (if you know of one, let me know!), I had 25,000 words already written about building a novel layer by layer, and I wanted a place I could send clients to. So I made one. I love that I made one, even though it’s off to a relatively slow start. I’m still experimenting with how many articles a month is sustainable for me along with my main work, but I’m loving finding a sweet spot in the process, while getting some fiction concepts online that I don’t see talked about much.

I’ve also found, to my absolute chagrin, that I am capable of cleaning up while I make dinner. This leads to absolutely unconscionable results like a kitchen that remains in a fairly clean state day to day, a significant improvement in my focus when I’m not scrolling my phone when dinner cooks, and a happier husband.

I re-downloaded Todoist, and I’m enjoying how I can make it work for me, even in their free version. I’ve consistently used it for more than a month now, which is, unfortunately, way up there as a record for me and my inconsistent habits. In combination with my bullet journal, I’ve been able to get things done and keep records of what I do, both of which are so useful for me, when I tend to first procrastinate, and then forget everything I’ve completed once it’s checked off.

Takeaway: When I ask questions with answers in mind, and then disprove my own hypothesis, I’m doing it right. I’m learning new things, figuring out where my limits and interests are, and enjoying the process. Open-ended questions leave room for answering them slant, too — like asking which publications to pursue, and adding “my own” to a list of four others I also write for.

What’s next?

As the second quarter started, I wrote myself more questions, of course. I have 11 of them, only one (my question about what books I want to read and when) repeated from first quarter. Some are refined based on information I learned in the first quarter, e.g., “How do I feel when I start drinking plain water by 9am and drink at least 64 oz of plain water a day?” Some show how I’ve moved on — from drafting and an initial revision to preparing my book for CPs.

I’m really excited to see where these questions take me, even if it’s somewhere I hadn’t meant to go.

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