Every one of us has some list of goals we’d like to accomplish:

Exercise more.

Read more.

Get a better paying job.

Goals are great for building the life you want, but, once you add a deadline to them, they can become stressful. Exercise more suddenly sounds like “Run a marathon”. Read more feels like “Knock out War & Peace daily.  Get a better paying job sounds like “Be rich.”

One big one for me has been to write more.  I’ve attempted this through various methods:

Write one manuscript this year.

Write one blog post per week.

Write one blog post per month.

They all start out strong, but they eventually devolve into questioning if I could even manage one haiku per year.

I am lucky enough to have ADHD and one of the fun parts of having ADHD is seeing a big challenge, feeling like its insurmountable and then freezing.  The key to success for an ADHDer is breaking projects into smaller parts. 

Walk three times per week.

Read five pages per day.

Send out two resumes this week.

This has turned my writing goal to

Write 50 words each day.

Technically it’s “write at least 50 words each day” as once you get started you’ll end up getting on a roll.  For example, I wrote about 50 words of this yesterday.  And currently I’ve written more than 120 words.  I’m an overachiever today.

A lot of times, it’s just getting started.  It doesn’t take much for “send out two resumes” to turn into five resumes or “walk three miles” to end up as a daily walk.

What are your goals for the year? How are you breaking them down? What are your so-called “50 words”?