I Could But Should I? Goal Setting When the Future is Uncertain

The whole world feels bit uncertain right now. Weeks turned to months and we’ve been in this holding pattern for half a year. We’ve all had to make hard decisions with incomplete information and potentially high stakes. It feels like that are no good options, only more or less bad ones.

It seems like a terrible time to goal setting. But if this is the life I’m going to be living for the unspecified future, I don’t know about you, but I need to refocus. I still can’t believe it’s already been six months! Six months waiting for things to get better so I can move forward. Six months holding my breath and waiting to live.

So I’ve decided that I’ve been waiting long enough and the time has come to start working towards the long-held goals in my life, even if I do so irregularly or imperfectly.

Start with the Long Term

I never liked five-year goals. When I was younger, it seemed too long to even contemplate when the daily felt so impossible. My last baby is about to turn five and I can honestly say that my life looks nothing like I expected. Granted the last five years have probably been more fraught with challenge than the previous ten. But I still wish I’d had a clearer idea of what I wanted to accomplish. A lot of good things happened. But a lot of other good things were left behind.

In my case, I’m up against a major milestone birthday in about two and a half years. So I’m asking myself the question, what do I want to have accomplished before I’m 40?

Physically, intellectually, creatively, emotionally, relationally: where do I want to be?

Obviously I can’t necessarily accomplish huge goals in all those areas in less than five years but this isn’t a stage for planning, but rather for dreaming.

Pick the Top Contenders

After you’ve made a list of your big ticket goals with a long term timeline, try narrowing them down. Prioritize the top two or three. That doesn’t mean the other goals go away or that you won’t work toward them at all, but they won’t be your top priority.

Plan in Reverse

Now that you have your top contenders and your timeline you can backward plan. If your goal is to complete a novel or manuscript in the next five years, choose a completion date, then estimate the number of words you need to complete it and set up a daily, weekly or monthly word count.

Jeff Goins popularized the idea of 500 words a day. In a year, that’s more than the length of most first novels, even if you don’t write every day.

Make Room in Your Life

If the goal is to run a marathon in the next two years, find a good training plan and figure out how many hours a week you need to devote to training. Then figure out when and how you will make it happen.

This is the step I’m the worst at because I only ever want to add things, never subtract.

I find myself most successful when I can make my daily goals small and cumulative and start with a short timeline, like one month or forty days. Writing every day for a month may not produce a finished novel, but it will give me the satisfaction of accomplishing a smaller goal to help motivate me for a bigger one.

It’s also easier to make room in my life for small things. Half an hour a day feels way more manageable than a whole day every week or every evening from dinner until bedtime.

There is a lot I could have accomplished during the last six months, most of which I didn’t. In did other things, some of which I’m glad about and others I regret. There are definitely things in my life that take up far too much time that I’d like to streamline, and other things that probably should be given top billing that are currently languishing away on a back burner.

But the only way to make that happen is to begin setting goals for myself. Measurable, attainable, manageable, steps towards the things that matter to me. So that pandemic or not, I won’t look back in another five years and wonder why I didn’t at least try.