(This is a rough draft of notes I’m making towards more formal essays on writing/motivation/etc. See my BSky feed for more on the hashtag #HacksawDraft)
Tracking goals is one of the fundamentals of the creative life. Here’s a suggestion for exploring a way to track goals in a way that’s better for you.
There are a lot of different ways to do these. To-do lists are an obvious example.
This is not the world’s most enormous list. But, it’s a lot of different stuff to deal with.
This list is instantly better and more manageable for me if I break it up into nested chunks:
This is obvious enough, when you think about it – people talk about ‘chunking’ in a lot of different contexts, but it’s going to be easier if my store run and the stuff I need is kept separate from a household task like planning.
To-do lists are a fairly standard method of goal planning and organization, and are helpful for small, discrete tasks – stuff where each individual step is the work of a few minutes, maybe an hour or two.
One of the reasons they work? Every single time you cross something off that list, every time you recognize ‘I have achieved what I set out to do’, you are giving yourself a reason to celebrate – however small that celebration is, just a smile at yourself is enough. The more you celebrate yourself, the better.
As a creative, I like writing novels. This is not a single-step task.
A lot of our goals will take days, weeks, months. That is an intimidating amount of time to think about.
So, again, we can break it down into chunks.
If I know that my book has 20 chapters to write, and I know I can write a chapter in a week, I can make a grid and do something like this:
And by checking off every chapter as I write it, I can both keep track of what I’m doing and help make the progress tangible and real. In the middle of writing, I can see maybe a single page of my writing and there will be hundreds and hundreds of those – the progress is far away. Tricks to bring the progress right in front of my face are important.
But. We have to do it in the right way. Because something like this:
… does not feel like progress in the same way.
In fact, my new favourite way to check off progress is actually something like this:
Remember how much better the to-do list looked, split up into groups of chunks?
Splitting up the check-off grid or progress squares or whatever you want to call them like this means that at every stage I’m working on a section of the whole, and I don’t merely have a reason to celebrate every time I check off one square – each group of five is one, too.
The trick here is to find out what scale and style of thing your brain likes working with when it comes to tracking goals.
Jerry Seinfeld famously had a thing about crossing off days on a calendar to build a big unbroken chain of big red X’s across the whole year to help make sure he was writing every day, for example. That doesn’t work for me because my circumstances mean creating an ‘unbroken chain’ is a fool’s errand, but with the split up to-do lists I can break things down to whatever size I can manage then and there. With the split up check-off grid, I am always on the way to an achievable milestone.
Make sure your milestones are spaced apart at a distance that works for you.
Experiment. Come up with some arbitarary task – I have used moving all my pens from one side of the desk to the other twenty times over – and try out different ways of tracking your progress as you do it.
A big long string of check boxes? I keep looking at that long string and I feel lost in it. Spaced out groups of checkboxes, with no more boxes than fingers on my hand in each group? If I get distracted in the middle, when I come back to it I’m never that far off from finishing out a group of five. That’s important to me.
Maybe a long string is more meaningful to you – a clearer path and mountain. Maybe doing it as a to-do list would work better for you, with 20 individual entries you cross out. Maybe there’s another method entirely – Kanban boards are a thing, as are work journals or getting cheap notebooks where you use each page for a task then rip the pages out.
What’s important is that you experiment before you settle on a method. Seriously. Take ten minutes to try out a couple of different methods, maybe invent one of your own.
Pick up all the pens on your desk, move them to the left, and mark off your progress in whatever way feels good to you. Then, move them to the right. And if you can find a method that makes tracking progress, here, even vaguely meaningful? It’s worth trying out on something that does mean something to you. And if it doesn’t? It might just not suit you in the long term, either.
And remember, other people’s productivity solutions and tips are worth trying, to see if they fit you, but they will never be universal solutions for everybody. So if you haven’t found what works for you, yet, keep searching, inventing, playing, and looking/asking for help you find something that does.
