OK…therapy time, everyone…brisk confession here…
At some point, I got inverted.
I became a master of project-driven, next-action crunching brilliance. I was a productive machine. And the results were good…really. Very good.
But for some reason…I was having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Even with my ritualized systems and finely-organized project and task lists, I was having a difficult time engaging with my work.
I was certainly connected with “what matters” and was even working hard against the right objectives. Still, I was engaged with my head and my hands, but not my heart.
And metaphors are a thing of the heart, no?
I have always had a love-hate relationship with goals. This is mostly because I tend to set them so high that I never achieve them, even if I still achieve a lot along the way. (”Outline book proposal” turns into “complete book proposal by Friday.” I might get a good bit of it done, but I’ll always feel under-accomplished because I didn’t “hit the mark.”)
I am learning a lot about myself and motivation. I’m also learning that setting and accomplishing shorter-term, more realistic goals is much more enjoyable than accomplishing the same things but never feeling like I “measure up” because the bar was too high.
I now have three major goals for Accidental Creative and four major goals for my personal/family life. This doesn’t form the entirety of my daily activity, but it certainly allows for much more clarity about which projects to take on and which to defer. I’m tracking the goals in my notebook.
I am really curious to know how you set and track meaningful activity. Do you set goals? If so, how and in what kind of time-frame? How do you track them?
In this interview, 
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