Happy New Year!...Now Back to Work...
The New Year arrived exactly on time this year - no surprises there. And, just like clockwork, many of us are back at work - no surprises there either. So let's welcome 2018, a new year for us Catholic men at work, with a couple of comments and suggestions.
First, if you made a New Year's resolution or two, you might want to reconsider right now - before you get too frustrated. Apparently, about 8 percent of us actually pursue these with any success. There are many reasons for this, e.g., being too ambitious or even completely unrealistic. Indeed, personal experience convinced me a long time ago that the whole endeavor was a royal waste of time. Besides, if you've put some effort into planning for your business or your life, the resolutions become superfluous. Get on with your plan and get down to work. It's not complicated.
Next let's talk about that plan. If you found our posts about planning your business and your life - the ones that pop up right before Thanksgiving every year - we've got a further suggestion about these, really a kind of update. It has to do with the part about breaking down your long-term goals into smaller bite-sized pieces. We're going to make a change to our original suggestion having to do with putting dates on what you want to accomplish - whether your overall goal or your break-down of that big goal into smaller parts.
Based on experience, and something I recently read, I'm not so sure you need the dates for the smaller bite-sized pieces. - something we were originally adamant about. (In fact, I'm not so sure you even need dates for the big goals either, but we'll focus on the breakdowns now.) This year I'm trying something new. Here's the sequence for 2018:
To start the year, I'll note where things stand with each goal. For some I will have made more progress, some less. I've got a sense of which ones I need to spend more time on, which ones don't require all that much time. With that in hand, I'll jot down what I want to accomplish in January based on a realistic assessment of what is both possible and likely. As I work through the month, at the beginning of each week I can then jot down what I might try to get done for this or that goal and see how it goes.
So what's new and different about this approach? I'm not "projecting" out over a whole year, then breaking that into 12 monthly parts, further broken down into weekly, based on some sort of rigid "mathematical" formula. I've found that doesn't work for me. The basic reason is this: Making progress on a goal isn't always linear or in any other way mathematical. You encounter difficulties or roadblocks you didn't anticipate. If you've got things plotted out for the whole year, those difficulties and roadblocks will throw you off track; you'll likely fall behind - sometimes so far behind, you can become either discouraged; maybe you wind up ignoring your plan altogether.
So now, instead of following preset deadlines based on math, you engage with each goal on an ongoing basis and adjust what needs to be done. Ongoing assessments based on current experience should help you both more effectively and more realistically set weekly objectives that you'll be more likely to accomplish. We'll see how it works this year.
The common theme here: Avoid discouragement and frustration. This more flexible and realistic approach should help tremendously here. Just don't expect this technique to totally eliminate frustration, even discouragement, of course. It's a natural part of life; it comes with the territory. But we're hoping to avoid unnecessarily contributing to the natural, inevitable frustrations and disappointments that make up our daily lives.
With that in mind, our next few posts will take a step back to get more firmly grounded in our spiritual lives so we can more effectively pursue our goals as true Catholic men at work. For that we'll turn to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Next time we'll see how normal frustrations and disappointments can naturally point our hearts and minds to a fuller and deeper spiritual life.
First, if you made a New Year's resolution or two, you might want to reconsider right now - before you get too frustrated. Apparently, about 8 percent of us actually pursue these with any success. There are many reasons for this, e.g., being too ambitious or even completely unrealistic. Indeed, personal experience convinced me a long time ago that the whole endeavor was a royal waste of time. Besides, if you've put some effort into planning for your business or your life, the resolutions become superfluous. Get on with your plan and get down to work. It's not complicated.
Next let's talk about that plan. If you found our posts about planning your business and your life - the ones that pop up right before Thanksgiving every year - we've got a further suggestion about these, really a kind of update. It has to do with the part about breaking down your long-term goals into smaller bite-sized pieces. We're going to make a change to our original suggestion having to do with putting dates on what you want to accomplish - whether your overall goal or your break-down of that big goal into smaller parts.
Based on experience, and something I recently read, I'm not so sure you need the dates for the smaller bite-sized pieces. - something we were originally adamant about. (In fact, I'm not so sure you even need dates for the big goals either, but we'll focus on the breakdowns now.) This year I'm trying something new. Here's the sequence for 2018:
To start the year, I'll note where things stand with each goal. For some I will have made more progress, some less. I've got a sense of which ones I need to spend more time on, which ones don't require all that much time. With that in hand, I'll jot down what I want to accomplish in January based on a realistic assessment of what is both possible and likely. As I work through the month, at the beginning of each week I can then jot down what I might try to get done for this or that goal and see how it goes.
So what's new and different about this approach? I'm not "projecting" out over a whole year, then breaking that into 12 monthly parts, further broken down into weekly, based on some sort of rigid "mathematical" formula. I've found that doesn't work for me. The basic reason is this: Making progress on a goal isn't always linear or in any other way mathematical. You encounter difficulties or roadblocks you didn't anticipate. If you've got things plotted out for the whole year, those difficulties and roadblocks will throw you off track; you'll likely fall behind - sometimes so far behind, you can become either discouraged; maybe you wind up ignoring your plan altogether.
So now, instead of following preset deadlines based on math, you engage with each goal on an ongoing basis and adjust what needs to be done. Ongoing assessments based on current experience should help you both more effectively and more realistically set weekly objectives that you'll be more likely to accomplish. We'll see how it works this year.
The common theme here: Avoid discouragement and frustration. This more flexible and realistic approach should help tremendously here. Just don't expect this technique to totally eliminate frustration, even discouragement, of course. It's a natural part of life; it comes with the territory. But we're hoping to avoid unnecessarily contributing to the natural, inevitable frustrations and disappointments that make up our daily lives.
With that in mind, our next few posts will take a step back to get more firmly grounded in our spiritual lives so we can more effectively pursue our goals as true Catholic men at work. For that we'll turn to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Next time we'll see how normal frustrations and disappointments can naturally point our hearts and minds to a fuller and deeper spiritual life.
Happy New Year!
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