The Wander Notebook

A personal journey of lifelong learning, sharing resources, creating things, and trying to be better.

Tag: Goals

6 Ways to Achieve New Things

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On February 16, 2020

In Blogging

Getting back on your horse, no matter how many times you’ve fallen off.

Project Journal Bar

In my last post, I talked about the struggles and failures I’ve faced the past few years. I’ve been thinking about how to tackle my short-comings and problems to solve a single, relatively-simple issue that’s plagued me nearly my entire life: consistency in my work ethic.

There needs to be more hand-holding involved — change does not come quickly nor simply. So I’ve devised an entirely new project for myself: Journal Bar. This is a new blog that I’ve made where I’m going to be posting about the progress I’ve been making weekly. The (very simple) ingenious part is that I’m tracking the posts I write.

So, this is a sort of meta-accountability experiment. Having a goal that’s in charge of making sure I keep on-track with all of my other goals. The idea behind this is so simple that I’m kicking myself for not thinking about it sooner.

This idea and the progress I’ve made is very new, but I feel as though I’m going slowly enough to ensure that I don’t fizzle out quickly and lose interest or energy for it. In addition to keeping track of my progress, I’ve also elected to use the blog as a space to write rough ideas that I’ll want to implement into articles later.

Going through the whole Beeminder process again opened my eyes to a few things that I believe will be helpful regarding perseverance with long-term results:

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Was I doing it all wrong?

Goal Failure

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On February 6, 2020

In Blogging

A post-capitalist critique on boiling frogs, minimum-happiness, harmful-easy things, and lists.

Beeminder 2.0

Over two years ago, I wrote The Tao of Bees, where I dutifully explained the differences between commonly-used to-do lists and the more long-term, uncommonly-used system thinking as a method to maintain and accomplish your goals. In my second article, The Sting of Work, I delved deeper into the ideas behind setting better goals and maintaining them.

What has happened in the time since then? There is a rich irony in this — A schadenfreude that can be had over the fact I failed to eat my own dog food.

This can be chalked up to a multitude of reasonings: No longer finding interest in Beeminder, having a change of direction in my life, hitting a deep episode of depressive thinking, general sheer laziness and hypocrisy, et cetera, et cetera.

After reviewing both my minor successes and major failures over an extended period of time, there are more mature conclusions on the idea of system thinking as a way of living that I can share. This is in sharp contrast to the more idealistic and frankly naïve explanations I had a few years ago.

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Cogs

SYSTEMS: A Better Approach to Accomplishing Goals

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On January 16, 2018

In Blogging

There’s a superior method to ensure ambitions are fulfilled.

Summary: Change your mindset when it comes to ambitious goals — break them down into tangible and practical daily routines.

Author’s Note: This article is an expansion of two articles I wrote for Beeminder:
The Tao of Bees
The Sting of Work

Dreams on the Backburner

As a writer, I find myself getting into slumps where I don’t write anything at all. Contradictory? — There will be eighty different half-finished pieces in my drafts. I’ll have a late-night epiphany while trying to go to sleep or in the middle of a shower about what would make a good post.

But then I never write the posts. Eventually, those supposedly great ideas just disappear, and I grow old and whither away and die, and never publish anything. The end.

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