Conquering the Creative Work-Life Balance: Simplify Your Goal Setting

One of the things I’ve wanted to do with this whole “Conquering the Creative Work-Life Balance” series is to balance out all the life processes in order to simplify the motions we go through in life. My goal is to make living life less complicated and convoluted and complex, so that the barriers to accomplishing tasks and goals become weakened enough to be broken down.

Lofty goal. I know. And that’s why I underlined the word, less, in the statement above. I was deliberate in my choice of word because I know how complex life can be. Truly. And quite frankly, there are some things outside of our control. So, you do what you can with what you’ve been dealt in life and you try to work it out for your good.

From me, you’ll always get the silver lining perspective, based in reality. (Hey, I like that saying — just made it up.) And I’ll always strive to encourage you to do what is within your control to do.

So, what’s within your control to do?

I’m going to answer with . . . not biting off more than you can chew. And let’s follow that statement by engaging in a chatting session about simplifying in goal-setting.

Now, if you’ve heard this once, then you’ve probably heard it many more times, but I’m going to reiterate it here ONE . . . MORE . . . TIME.

Break your OVERALL goals down into bite-sized pieces that are doable and can be successfully checked off your list of to-dos when completed.

Those OVERALL goals are usually made up of multiple “mini” goals that are representative of all the little steps that need to be accomplished in order to complete that OVERALL goal. So, here’s one way you simplify your goal setting:

You look at your OVERALL goal briefly but long enough to identify all the little steps involved in accomplishing the OVERALL goal. Those little steps, my friend, will make up the mini goals that you’ll tackle. And you’ll tackle them one by one, focusing on the first step in the line of little steps until you can cross little step 1 (mini goal 1) off your to-do list. Then, you go on to little step 2 (mini goal 2) in the OVERALL goal, working your way on down the list of little steps (mini goals) and checking them off as you go.

And guess what? Well, you’ll eventually come to a point in the process where you’ll be able to cross off that highly-complex OVERALL goal that may have looked a bit daunting at first but became more and more manageable as you progressed through the “simplifying goals by breaking them down” process.

Managing an overwhelming task has everything to do with the mindset we choose to adopt in handling that task. We can look at an apple sitting on our dinner plate in one of two ways. We can look at it as:

1. too huge to fit the entire thing in your mouth to even have a chance of consuming it, or
2. digestible, once it’s cut up into pieces (or bit into) so that it can be easily chewed up and swallowed.

And if you didn’t guess already, option 1 leads to the “give up” factor (leaving the apple on the plate); whereas, option 2 leads you to getting things done in incremental pieces (or chewing that bad boy down).

I choose to simplify the process of GETTING THINGS DONE by doing the mini work that adds up over time and knocks out the big stuff that tends to look insurmountable at first glance. But if you’d slow down enough to stop and do a double take, you’d find that there’s a way (maybe even more than one way) to break down that apple.

We’ll be using today’s topic of discussion to help us in the next step of the process toward conquering the work-life balance. Until then . . .