Motivation: Aiming toward your goal

It’s time to come clean.

As you can see, I’m not great about keeping up with my content right now. And I’m breaking one of my own rules about SEO — that you have to keep up a steady pace of content.

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It usually depends on the individual. Some are really good about a piece of content daily, some are more about doing one per week — I was hoping to aim for the latter, but that hadn’t happened as of now.

And right now, during this worldwide pandemic, I’m clearly not alone. Motivating yourself to get the job done is difficult — the rules, not just one or two but ALL of them, have changed!

In a recent Nieman Lab story, several podcasters have discussed how taking care of their kids has cut their ability to work down a good bit, worn them out, and burned them out.

As for myself, getting bogged down in daily life and not being able to do the usual things can often lead to weird circumstances right now. Not knowing what day it is, for example — not date, mind you, DAY. I forgot if it was Tuesday or Wednesday the other day.

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I think my favorite motivational techniques are accountability and scheduling. What I’m doing right now is accountability — I’m letting the world know that I have made a mistake in not achieving a self-derived goal, and I’m making a promise to both you and me that I’m going to do better.

That said, I’m not going to beat myself up if I stray, miss a week or two, etc. But I’m going to aim for at least one post a week.

The second is to schedule. I am going to set up an appointment with myself to get a post done every week. I found this very effective during my furlough — although my tendency toward laziness sometimes derailed it. But I found that I more often than not followed my schedule, and was able to at least achieve some of my goals.

They’re small things, but they get the job done. Which is what I would like to do here.