New starts.

The start of September has always felt like the second new year, with the end of summer and the start of the new school year. So now seems like the perfect time to address the things that I want to achieve this year. I don’t want it to be a list of the usual resolutions that are vital to office small talk in January. Those have never been useful to me. And to be perfectly honest, I doubt there are that many people that stick to their resolutions for more than a month or two. What I think is more useful is a “big picture” to do list. A list of the actual goals you want to achieve, rather than the vague intentions to get fit or be productive.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m about to start my third and final year at university, and understandably, a lot of my goals are aimed at making the most of it. My first goal is to completely overhaul the way that I study, so it’s much more effective. For the last two years, I’ve used the excuse that I work better with the pressure of a close deadline to avoid studying, leading to a panicked all nighter and hoping my computer doesn’t freeze so I can submit my coursework in the actual last minute. Or the days when I’d be finishing my reading for class on the bus to campus, instead of the night (or week) before. I get it done, but it’s far too stressful. My goal for this year is to change that. Maybe I could set timers to keep myself focused while working, or have a solid routine with allocated times for work. Another idea would be to set up accountability partners, like in a study group. I could organise a group of my course friends together to meet up and work in the same space.

That last idea would also be a good start for my next goal, which is to be more social. To be honest, apart from the odd coffee after class, I haven’t spent too much time with the friends I’ve made, and I definitely haven’t made as many new ones as I’d hoped. This is completely my fault. This year, I want it to be different, especially because I’ll have so few hours in class that there won’t be as many in-built social gatherings. To change that, some ideas might be to actually go to the meetings of the societies that I join with good intentions in the first week. Or, as I said earlier, to arrange to study with some of the people in my classes. It’s completely obvious, but I’ve always been too scared to make the first move.

Outside of university, my other goals are career related. In the first semester, I want to find some work experience, and to do that I’d need to approach the companies I’d like to work for myself. I’ve known exactly what I’ve needed to do, now it’s just a case of working up the courage to follow through and do it. The worst that can happen is that they’ll say no, right? Lately I’ve also spent a lot of time planning a few things that I can do myself, that in the short term will give me some valuable experience in the field that I’d like to work in. And in the long term, who knows? I could make a career out of it.

Really, all of these goals can be simplified into one: go for it. Making specific and achievable goals will help, I hope. That way, it’s not as intimidating as telling myself that I’m going to get fit without having done any research to see what I need to do to get there. Do you have any goals for the next year? And how are you going to start reaching these goals? Tell me, I’d love to hear from you.

5 things this week.

Lately I haven’t exactly been living my best life. I’ve been eating too much, exercising too little, going to bed too late. To absolve myself of responsibility, I blamed it on starting my job. I’d been on my feet all day, so why go for a run? I’m tired, I deserve a treat. You know how it goes. All this caught up with me last night, and for the first time since starting, I missed a post. There are two things that I can do now. I can either let the habit that has started to form drop off, or I can make the changes that I need to so I can get back on track.

I wanted to stick with my regular Sunday format, and use this list as a way of working out for myself what I need to do to turn this around.

1. Go to bed earlier. This is the most obvious thing, and I’ve really been avoiding it. I spend all evening faffing around on the internet, instead of turning my laptop off at a reasonable time so I can get to bed earlier. Maybe I should set some sort of alarm on my phone to remind me to turn it off and switch to a book instead. It really is too obvious for me to avoid, and I know that it will help me in the long run if I stick to it. But the first step to solving your problem is to admit that you have one, so here’s to that, I guess.
2. In the same vein, I need to get up earlier in the mornings. As much as I love a lie in, at this point in my life I’m definitely a morning person. But not the kind of morning person that can get up and go, with no buffering time. There’s definitely an hour or so of grumbling before I’m ready for the general public. So getting up earlier gives me the time to grumble around the house, guilt-free. It also means that I would have the time to run before work, instead of waiting till after when I have an excuse not to.
3. Stop buying so many snacks! This is my real problem. I have a huge sweet tooth, and almost no self control when it comes to it. But the excuse that I use to get around it is that my meals are usually quite small. Maybe a more reasonable solution to this problem would be to buy individually wrapped portions, as a way of avoiding the temptation of the open packet. Or I could portion (and make) my own snacks myself; I’m sure that there’s a Pinterest tutorial out there somewhere for this, right?
4. Start journalling. I thought this blog would be the place that would hold me accountable; nope. It only works that way if I hold myself accountable. If I have a place to write down my successes and failures of the day, maybe I’ll be better able to convince myself to focus more on my successes than to my failures. Who wants to write out a list of all the things they didn’t do that day? No-one. So I just need to make sure that I don’t have to.
5. Take the pressure off. The thing that holds me back is the pressure that I put on myself. I’m definitely an all or nothing kind of lady. I’m either calorie counting and running daily, or I’m lying in bed binging on peanut M&Ms. My logic is that if I’ve had a bad moment, then the rest of the day is fucked, so why hold back. I need to let go of that mentality.

There’s a few steps that I need to take in order to be my best self. We all have our flaws, but what makes us different is the way that we deal with them. I’ve decided that I need to accept my mistakes, but learn from them and move forward.

Setting a goal.

When I decided to start writing every day, that was all that I decided. I didn’t put a time limit on it, or a number of posts to reach before I called it a success. And to be honest, I don’t know that I ever will. Realistically I know that this can’t continue indefinitely. I have other projects planned, and other things that will probably take precedence over this.

So instead of numerical goals, I have another goal in mind. It’s more a self-improvement one than anything else. I started this as someone who barely ever wrote outside of coursework and Twitter updates. Whenever I do decide to end it, I want to be in a position to continue writing everyday through habit and disciple. No doubt this will be useful for practical reasons, like avoiding procrastion followed by all-nighters. I’ve had more than a few of those in my time and I don’t want anymore. My motivations are as simple as that.

Not only self-improvement, I also want to just improve. Improve my writing skills, my concentration, my motivation. Most of all, to approach a blank space with the mindset to fill it, instead of ignoring it until I absolutely have to. I read a quote somewhere online earlier that said something along the lines of “the man standing on a mountain didn’t fall there”. It’s the kind of thing that you’ve always known, but don’t really acknowledge. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the idea of “natural” talent. What I’m trying to acknowledge in my life is that there’s no such thing. This challenge to myself has forced me to realise that I’m only okay at writing, not as good as I could be and nowhere near as good as I thought I was. If you start something today, who knows where you’ll be in one year. Two years. A decade. If you don’t, you’ll look back in that year and wish that you started earlier.

Writing, in all forms.

Blogging every day is going well for me so far. At least, I haven’t missed a day yet so that should count for something. There are days when my posts come naturally, and there are days when they don’t. Days when I spend far too long staring at the blank text box hoping for something to happen. But each day, I push through the blocks and get on with it anyway. And I’m proud of this. In the past I’ve been a chronic procrastinator, who struggles to find the motivation to get as far as the title for my work, let alone the rest of the writing.

My aim now is to carry this habit through to other forms of writing. I’m thinking about starting to keep a journal again, something that in the past I’ve only managed for a few days at a time. They say that we all have a novel inside us; maybe now is the time for me to find mine. I don’t need to explain why cultivating a writing habit like this will be useful during the next year of my degree. Especially with my disseration coming up so soon. (Scary thought! If you have any tips that helped you to get through yours, please let me know. I’m terrified of it.)

I’m already writing more than I did before, in ways that I didn’t expect. I have a notebook that is steadily filling with quotes, ideas, disjointed thoughts that needed a home somewhere. There are sticky notes on my wall with more. Each morning, I’ve started to sit with a pen and paper and just brainstorm. It doesn’t matter what ideas happen in those moments, but they’re written and preserved for the time I decide to use them. As a side note, that’s an exercise that I would thoroughly recommend. Grab a scrap of paper and the nearest thing to write with and just think. Let the ideas happen. It’s therapeutic as anything, and if you’re struggling with a problem, it might be then that you manage to solve it.

The last real barrier that I have in writing is how to write for a prompt that isn’t on my mind. You might describe my blogs as freeform; I start with a thought and follow it through. I definitely didn’t plan this part, if you needed any proof. But I have a whole list of other ideas that I think would make good posts on here that I’d like to work through eventually. And it’s definitely a useful skill to be able to write to a brief or within constraints. I have a plan to tackle it though. It’s early stages yet, so I’m still in the honeymoon stage of motivation. You know, the stage before I’ve actually started doing anything for it but it seems like a fun idea. I’ll let you know how it works out. This exercise is definitely helping me to trust myself and my ideas, if nothing else.

Holding on to motivation.

Motivation is hard to find, and harder to keep hold of once you have it. Right now, I’m losing mine in relation to this blog. I no longer have the same desire to become “a blogger” that I had when I started this daily writing challenge. I’m on the verge of quitting the challenge, maybe even deleting this blog, and focusing my energy onto other parts of my life. But I haven’t.

What I’ve found is that it isn’t motivation that keeps my going. It’s disciple. I have a weekly planner pad that I keep on my desk, and I try to stick to the plan that I wrote out for that day. Sometimes I might do them out of order, but they always get done. I use it for more than just chores; for example, I allocate days of the week to go on a run, even if I don’t want to. And on every single day, I remind myself of the commitment I made to write a blog post every day. It’s an easy(ish) way to break down the things that you need to do, by forcing you to take it each day at a time. It’s much less daunting than motivating yourself to complete a huge weekly to-do list. It’s a tip that’s helped me to deal with my university work, as well. I look at my reading, divide the number of pages by the number of days I have to do it, and a 500 page novel becomes five 100 page novels. The same thing works for essays and word counts. Give yourself a minimum to complete, instead of only looking at the maximum.

This isn’t a lesson in how best to use a planner. It’s a lesson in how little you can rely on motivation to get us to do the things that we need to do. Take things one day at a time by giving yourself things to do on each of those days.