This weekend I spent a lot of time sitting around staring at blank paper. It was a good thing, though.
I’ve been writing a lot over the past nine months about goals, dreams, plans, and aspirations. I’ve talked about focusing on what I want while also keeping the bills paid, and I’ve whined about not having the time to do everything I want to do. But I have not actually sat down and committed to a plan of action, which was what all the staring-at-blank-paper was about.
I took the tactic of looking at my next set of goals the same way I approached graduate school: work every day towards concrete goals that fit into my larger “dream big,” long-term plan. I took the grad school framework of “a two-year agenda ending in a verifiable accomplishment” and applied that to what kind of person I want to be.
It wasn’t easy. I might have maybe sat in the middle of my living room floor and cried. I made lists and lists of lists and an excel spread sheet. I looked hard at what I want to do and put them into a priority. Do I want to learn wood working? Sure I do, but it had to go to the bottom of the list for a variety of reasons.
Now, I’m ready to buckle down and make things happen. As with grad school, I will have to spend 1-2 hours a day (depending on caffeine levels, I think!) doing the work it will take to make my dreams into reality, on top of working a 40+ week job (and surprising news might be coming up on that front, soon).
I’m both dreading and looking forward to it. It’s nice to be focused again, to look at my calendar and know what I’m supposed to be doing. In fact I’ve got a huge 2-month dry-erase calendar board that I’ve filled out for October and November, to help me visualize what I’m doing.
I’ll talk in more detail about my goals in future posts. Right now I’m just setting this out here for accountability.