Having a good day–a day when things are going well, when you feel in a groove and are making good choices–can just happen, but it can also come from good preparation (see “How Preparation Enables Stronger Willpower“). Here are some ways we can prepare the night before to have a particularly good day. In a follow-up article, I’ll talk about things we can do in the morning to start a day off on the right foot.

• Plan extra time into the next morning. The more we have to rush in the morning, the more tense we tend to be and the more likely something will go wrong–or that a slight delay will be a serious problem instead of a nuisance. Also, starting the day off well generally requires having a little time in the morning to think, and ideally time to meditate and/or exercise.
  If you find yourself being late in the mornings, you can change that by following the recommendations in “How Not to Be Late: The 8 Principles of Being on Time.”
• Get a good night’s sleep. It can be difficult to change our nighttime habits to get more sleep or to get enough but get up earlier, yet the payoffs are much higher, as a rule, than, say, getting an extra hour to watch TV. See “18 Ways to Get a Good Night’s Sleep.”
• Solve problems in advance. If you can predict some of the trouble you may run into during the day–like getting into a bad mood because of a meeting with someone you don’t like, or having to get past a counter full of free bagels while trying to lose weight–you can picture solutions and make plans. It’s much easier to act on a plan you’ve already made when trouble arises than to improvise one on the spot, especially if you’re distracted or overwhelmed. You may even want to write some of these solutions down to review in the morning.
• Choose one good thing to get done early on. Many of us have a lot of things we want to accomplish on any given day, but choosing one specific thing that especially needs to get done or that is particularly valuable can make it much easier to focus on and accomplish that thing early in the day, and that accomplishment can boost motivation and mood powerfully.

Photo by Éole

Over the past few weeks I’ve been through a major effort to go through all of my earthly possessions and get rid of everything I really don’t want or need. I used the “In what kind of realistic situation would I actually want to pull this out and do something with it?” test to decide what needed to go, as mentioned in my recent article “Some Tips for Getting Rid of Things.”

The things I set aside to get rid of went to a variety of places, some like the ones I mention in my article  “Clearing Your Mind by Cashing In.” Many items went to ReSource, a terrific local non-profit that provides a household good reuse store, building materials reuse store, and other departments while creating jobs and teaching job skills. Other materials were sold through Craigslist, given away through Craigslist and Freecycle, and set aside to be sold on Amazon and eBay. Of course our trash cans and recycle bin were also given a thorough workout.

The process, which is still in progress for me (I still need to finish going through books, primarily), took much longer than I would have imagined–but it also yielded a lot more things to sell or give away and freed up a lot more space than I would have imagined. Best of all, it has been taking innumerable little pressures and worries away: things I’ve held onto to fix or reuse somehow that I finally realized were trash, projects of going through things that are now done, and so on. Physical clutter can create mental clutter.

Coming to the end of this big push, I now have to ask myself: would it have been a lot easier on me to do this little by little over time? Or did I need to do it in one big push to do it at all?

The big push approach
The big push has some significant up sides. One of the biggest is that I didn’t have to reorient and remind myself of what I was doing every time I restart, which meant I could work efficiently. Another is that I could attack one part of the house, pull out everything in it, and take over as much space as I needed until I had sorted through all of that material. I also was able to easily keep focus on the job once I had started.

Yet another thing I like about the big push is the sense of accomplishment and catharsis. The change in my house was drastic, fast, and visible.

When doing a big push, it’s generally necessary to plan in advance and carve out time during which not only do you not have your usual responsibilities to attend to, but you won’t be badly distracted by other things you could do with the time, like socializing or relaxing. Big pushes generally require clearing the schedule, locking the door, and unplugging the phone.

The little by little approach
As great as the big push is, little by little has one killer advantage, which is that big pushes have a bad habit of never happening. For instance, if I were to wait until I actually had time to go through every piece of paper I own to get my papers organized, there’s a good chance that would literally never happen. Going through my things has taken about five full days so far–and I do mean full!–and that’s not counting the time I still need to put in selling off some of the things I’ve identified to get rid of. Being able to take that amount of time for organization alone was a rare opportunity, one that I jumped at, and for me, such opportunities come along often.

Another advantage of the little by little approach–and this too is a major plus–is that doing something consistently makes it into a habit. This is very useful for things that we’ll need to keep up once we get to our goal state. For example, if I were to do a major landscaping effort on my yard, doing it little by little would get me in the habit of working on the yard, which would be important to keeping up everything I had done in the initial effort.

Deciding on which approach to use
So if you’re facing a monumental project and are trying to decide whether to crank it out all at once or to do it little by little, here are some questions to ask yourself and some ideas to guide you based on those answers.

• Does it need to be done at all? Even though the project may be a worthy one, are you willing and able to devote the time it will require? For instance, it might be nice to send Christmas cards to 200 people this year, but is that project high enough in your priorities to be worth the time it will take?
• Does it need to be done very soon? If so, you may have no choice other than a big push.
• Is efficiency of the essence? Big pushes tend to be more efficient than going little by little because of not having to stop and restart.
• Are you going to learn as you go? When doing something little by little, you have a chance to reflect on and refine your methods. This can lead to great improvements in how you handle your project.
• Can you free up the amount of time a big push will need? If not, little by little is your only option.
• Will this be something you’ll need to maintain once the initial work is done? If so, little by little can do a better job of helping you develop the habits you’ll need.
• What if the project goes over? For most large projects, estimates are more guesswork than reliable prediction. If you were to set aside an amount of time for a big push and at the end find you needed twice as much time, what would you do? On the other hand, if you were going little by little and found out the project would take twice as long as you thought, would that push completion too far away into the future?
• Will you be getting help? Some help is better suited to big pushes, as with decluttering or physical labor. Other help is better suited to a little by little approach, as with processing documents that arrive through e-mail or working with people who don’t have large chunks of time available.

Whatever your approach, connecting with why you want to do the project will help you remain motivated.

Photo by druid labs

I’m currently in the midst of a two-day “decluttering vacation,” taking time off from my regular work to go through my house, get rid of things I don’t need, and organize the things I have left. I used to live in a larger house with a fair amount of storage, and I also used to have a less realistic idea of what I might really, actually use some day, so even though I’ve been getting rid of some stuff in recent years, my current, smaller house, which doesn’t have much storage space, has some packed closets and corners that I’d really like to clear out. (See my article “Clearing Your Mind by Cashing In.”)

It seems to me that the hardest part of decluttering doesn’t have anything to do with time, space, or materials: it’s the decisions. You find a book you read and liked ten years ago, or a tool that you’d lost for two years, or a stack of letters from a friend, and you think “Should I get rid of this? Will somebody be insulted if I get rid of it? Where would it even go if I did get rid of it? What if I get rid of it and I need it? I paid a lot of money for this!” and so on.

Many of these questions are misleading, because they get us involved in a lot of drama over the objects that doesn’t help us figure out whether or not the object belongs in our lives.

Let’s first say that if we don’t have any use for something, it’s best to get rid of it, even if that takes time and effort. I had a large laptop battery that was tapped out, no longer usable–but I didn’t want to throw it away, because I knew some of its materials might be toxic and that it could be recycled. I walked all over downtown Montpelier, Vermont trying to find a suitable battery drop-off, then did some searching online, then finally took it to a recycling bin for batteries at a local Best Buy store (though I also could have taken it to the dump and put it in the right place there, it turns out). This was a pain in the neck, but it was less of a pain in the neck than holding onto that useless object for the rest of my life! And the feeling of accomplishment and relief, although small, made a truly positive impact on my day.

So for the moment disregarding the question of what is to be done with an object once we decide it needs to go, here’s a proposal for a question that can help decide whether or not it should go in the first place: “In what kind of realistic situation would I actually want to pull this out and do something with it?”

Keep in mind that we’re trying to picture a situation that would actually happen, in which we would know where this item was, be willing and able to find it and get it out, and experience happiness or relief at having it available. There has to be a plausible payoff to keeping the thing. If there is no payoff, no value to keeping it, then it’s probably worth letting go.

It can take some time to get past our gut-level panic reactions at tossing something we may have had for years or paid a bundle for, but the effect of successfully ditching objects we really don’t need is often one of relief and pride, not to mention better organization and increased closet space. While getting rid of stuff isn’t always the most useful thing to do with our time, when it does come time to face that task, it’s an opportunity for becoming happier and more free.

It also can be done–and often will be more rewarding when done–in small amounts every day or several times a week rather than in one big push. (See “How to Reduce Stress and Get More Done by Turning a Project into a Habit.”)

One last note: decluttering doesn’t apply to data in the same way it does to physical objects. Electronic information can be searched automatically and takes virtually no physical space, and the amount of storage we have for that information grows exponentially over time as technology improves. So spending a full day going through all the files on your computer and deleting the ones you don’t need is probably not a great use of time. This is not to say it’s never worth deleting or offloading things from your computer, only that organizing data doesn’t pay off in the same way organizing objects does.

Photo by sindesign

Following up on my last article, “How Supporters and Partners Help Motivate Us,” here are some ways to find people to help your efforts toward reaching a goal.

1. Friends and family. It’s not unusual to hide goals from friends and family members, especially goals to fix things in our lives that aren’t going well, for instance getting fit or decluttering. But specific friends or family members who are likely to be sympathetic to our aims–even aims we’d usually keep private–can provide a welcome source of encouragement, feedback, and in some cases inspiration. People you know who are working toward the same goal you are can be especially helpful.
2. Local groups. The more common a goal, the more likely there are groups to help you succeed in it. Professional associations, Weight Watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous, writers’ groups, and other organizations can be invaluable. In most cases, it’s preferable for the group to include or be run by someone who is already successful in the area in question.
   Three good places to find local groups are the yellow pages, local daily and weekly newspapers, and www.meetup.com, a free resource for finding and forming local groups.
3. Cognitive therapists. Cognitive therapy can be particularly useful not only in helping work through emotional problems but also in clarifying goals and priorities, clearing away conflicts, and becoming more effective in life. Until relatively recently, far more emphasis in psychological research and practice has been put on people with serious difficulties than on what is now called “positive psychology”: building on strengths and realizing potential. In the last decade or two, this tide has begun to turn, creating much more awareness of therapy as a means to pursuing our better selves. Kari Wolfe contributed an article on this site that gives a good introduction to cognitive therapy, “What in the World is Cognitive Behavior Therapy?“.
4. Professionals. Depending on your goals, there may be professionals who can help you succeed: organization specialists, fitness trainers, coaches, and others. Both with these kinds of professionals and with therapists, it’s worth putting a good bit of effort into research, as a truly bad fit can be worse than doing nothing at all, but a very good fit can yield benefits far beyond the expected.
5. Classes. You may not necessarily need more education in the area of your goal, but if education is useful to you and available, getting involved in a class–whether it’s pursuing an MBA, taking a class offered through your local community, or even in some cases taking a course online–can provide connections to people who are care about your goal and can help you move forward.
6. Online groups and forums. Online groups in many cases don’t offer nearly as much human contact as groups that meet in person, but they can be easy to access and are often large, active and knowledgeable. They can be a source of support and camaraderie online as well as a possible way to meet people who can become friends in person. One excellent example is the free online fitness and weight loss site, SparkPeople.
7. Events. Events that focus on your goal area can be a great source of new contacts, ideas, friends, supporters, and colleagues.

Photo by foreverdigital

Recently a reader commented with this useful question: “How do I find people who can support me in reaching my goals, whether by encouragement, having the same/similar goal or even a goal of their own? Are there any tips you can offer regarding how to tell people that I’d like to work on a goal?” In this article, I’ll talk about how other people can fit into your plans for achieving your goals. In the follow-up, I’ll talk about specific ways you can find supporters and partners.

First, it’s worth mentioning some of the benefits of support and buddying up:

• More resources for information and help
• More reminders of what you’re doing and why it’s important
• People to cheer you on and help boost your mood
• An “audience,” people to witness your progress, making you less likely to just silently let your goal slip (although if you get very anxious about other people’s opinions, this may not be a good option for you)
• Sometimes, models to emulate
• Sometimes, companions to do things with
• Opportunities to maintain a feedback loop, to make it easy to reflect on how you’ve been doing and how you could tweak your approach for the better
• Increased social time in general, which even if it has nothing to do with your goal tends to improve mood (see “Want to Reduce Stress? Increase Social Time“).

People can help you in a variety of roles:

• mentors are skilled at doing whatever you’re trying to take on and can provide specific help and guidance. A mentor could be a friend or family member who has already done what you’re trying to do, a specialist like a personal trainer or professional organizer, a therapist, a coach, a teacher, etc.
• partners want to achieve the same goal you do and can get together with you to work on it. My belief, although I don’t know of any research to back this up, is that partners who are at about the same place you’re in work best, since you two are likely to face similar challenges, and you’ll neither be discouraged by the other person being far ahead of you or impatient at the person being far behind.
• groups get together on a regular basis to share ideas, witness each other’s progress (or sometimes lack of progress, because occasional failures and setbacks are a normal part of pursuing a goal), offer encouragement, and otherwise help keep each other on track. Online groups generally offer discussion and support without meetings, which adds flexibility but takes away the structure of a regularly scheduled check-in.
• role models can be people you know or people you’ve only heard of, and have achieved what you want to achieve. Role models offer the opportunity to learn how to successfully reach a goal and a clear reminder that it can be done.
• supporters include anyone who can make a constructive contribution to your progress by helping to provide information, encouragement, or discussion.
• competitors are other people trying to reach the same kind of goal as you who inspire you to work harder. Some of us respond well to competition and some don’t. If you’re someone who does, then trying to be the most successful person in your weight loss group or to get an agent before any of your other writer friends can be a good way to stay motivated.

There’s also one group to avoid: detractors. This includes anyone who will get in the way of you achieving your goal, whether or not they mean well. Anyone who encourages or excuses your bad habits, distracts you with things that prevent you from making progress, or actively tries to disrupt you through badmouthing, scoffing, unkind comparisons, or other tactics is worth avoiding if possible, keeping out of the loop if it’s not possible to avoid them, or ignoring if it’s not possible to keep them out of the loop.

Photo by Wootang01

This is the third article in a short series on prioritizing. The first article in the series, “Principles for Prioritizing, Part I: Moving Targets,” includes links to other articles on the site about organizing and prioritizing and is followed by “Principles for Prioritizing, Part II: Unimportant Tasks.”

3. How important something feels isn’t always a good indication of how important it is
To gauge how important something really is, it helps to put it in the context of what you really want in life. What are your key priorities? Going by gut feeling can sometimes lead us in the wrong direction because a task may be appealing or exciting or seem important because we’re wrapped up in it, when in fact it isn’t as important as other, less dramatic tasks. Try to judge the importance of an item from a distance, when you’re not deeply wrapped up in the task itself, by thinking about what effect it is likely to have in your life.

To get out of an obsession with a particular task that isn’t really a priority, allow your attention to focus on something else for at least a few minutes: have a conversation with a friend about a subject of mutual interest, or do a small task that’s unrelated to the one you’ve been involved in. These few minutes allow your brain to reorganize so that it’s not focused on that one possibly unimportant task, and let your physiology reset so that you’re not swept up in the biochemical side of emotion. In this state of mind, you can consider that appealing task in the context of all your other priorities.

4. The most important goal of prioritization is to find your top few tasks–especially your top one task
If you have a 200-item task list, it’s not particularly important to get all of your items prioritized so that, for instance, items 183 and 184 are in the proper order. Realistically, you may never get to items 183 and 184, and even if you do, circumstances are likely to change by the time you get there. The most effective way to prioritize is to care just about the top few tasks for the moment, so that you know what to start doing immediately and have one or two things queued up after you finish that first item. Doing this allows you to do what a task list is meant to help you do: focus on the one thing that it would benefit you most to be doing right now.

Finding those top few tasks may mean skimming over all 200 (or 20, or 2,000) items in your task list, but when skimming, the only thing to be thinking about is “what here would it be really good for me to tackle very soon?” The tasks that meet this criterion can then be sorted through with the question “Which of these would be most beneficial to do right now?”

That list of “very soon” things should never be more than a half dozen items long unless they’re very small items if you want to make good use of your searching. Anything more than that, and priorities are likely to change before you get to all of the items. Prioritize for the moment.

Photo by Chris JL

This is the second article in a short series on prioritizing. The first article in the series, “Principles for Prioritizing, Part I: Moving Targets,” appeared Monday, and includes links to other articles on the site about organizing and prioritizing.

Less important tasks may need to be dropped
When prioritizing tasks, we’re always dealing with at least two variables: how important something is and when it needs to be done. Do we do the immediate, less important thing or start working on the longer-term, more important thing instead? There’s no easy answer to this, but there are some ways to figure it out.

Of course important tasks that need to be done soon should take priority, and unimportant tasks that aren’t needed right away should be bumped to the end of your list–which for many of us may mean (sadly) that there will be no time for them. But of those other two possibilities–more important but less pressing and less important but more pressing–the decisions become more difficult. If you find that you are generally getting important things done on time without your life going haywire at all, you can probably afford to do the more urgent but less important tasks some of the time. But if you find that important, long-term things are often not getting done, not getting done well, or not getting done until the last minute, then what generally needs to happen is for some of those short-term but less important items to be dropped entirely from your task list so that you can get the more important things done.

For example, if you have a choice of working on some tax paperwork that’s due next week and reading a book for your book club meeting tomorrow, and if you find you often have trouble getting things like that tax paperwork done on time, then it’s probably time to take a hiatus from the book club.

To put it another way: effective prioritization often means giving up on less important tasks.

Photo by gingerpig2000

One of the most challenging things about managing a task list is prioritizing. You may literally have hundreds of things to do, from raking the leaves to learning a new job skill to making up a will. Comparing and ordering these items can be overwhelming.

Following are some basic principles to apply when prioritizing tasks that can help make sense out of a very complex set of priorities.

1. Priorities change all the time
It would be nice to be able to assign every task a priority that never changes, but from day to day–and sometimes hour to hour–too many things change for this to be the case. Scheduling a check-up becomes gradually more urgent the longer we put it off, or suddenly more urgent if health problems come up. Projects around the house may have to slide down the list of priorities when a new obligation comes up that makes it unlikely there will be time for them. Problems solve themselves or get worse from inattention; opportunities arise; people change their preferences and actions. Therefore, the best prioritization we can really achieve is the priority of things at the given moment, and the most effective task list is one that you can (and do) regularly re-prioritize.

This series will continue over the next several posts.

Related articles that may be of interest include:

• How Exceptions Cripple Organization
• 6 Steps to Overcome Procrastination
• My Top 1 Task
• Getting Rid of the Little, Distracting Tasks
• Useful Book: Getting Things Done
• Why Task Lists Fail
• 4 Ways to Make Sure You Get a Task Done
• Relieving Stress by Understanding Your Inputs
• To Free Your Mind, Capture Your Responsibilities
• Why Organization Improves Motivation, and Some Organization Tips

Photo by nerovivo

One of the hardest things to do in an emotionally heated conversation or argument is to communicate well about ourselves without encouraging the person or people we’re talking with to feel defensive. A particularly dangerous trap is trying to express an emotion and instead coming out with a judgment.

False emotional language
For example, there’s the common phrase “I feel that …” Because the word “feel” is involved, it’s easy to believe that a sentence starting this way is about an emotion–which is not the case.

For instance, if “I feel that this is unfair” is were to convey an emotion, what is that emotion supposed to be? Unfairfeelingness? Maybe there’s a word for that in German, but it’s not an emotion regardless of language. If I’m not happy with how something was done and believe it to be unfair, then I might be feeling vulnerable, resentful, disappointed, shocked, disturbed, indignant … actually, I might have any number of emotions about the situation (my next article will provide a list of emotional vocabulary, in case you’re interested). But “I feel that this is unfair” (whether or not we include the word “that”) is really a less clear way of saying “I think that this is unfair” or “It’s my judgment that this is unfair.” Not only does it portray something (unfairfeelingness) that’s not an emotion as though it is one, but it also fails to communicate the actual emotion, which could be any of the ones I listed, something else altogether, or a combination of emotions.

Here are some other examples of emotional-sounding language that isn’t actually describing the speaker’s emotions:

• “I feel used”
• “I’m hurt that he said that” (“hurt” means “damaged” or “wounded”: we have emotional reactions to being hurt, but saying that we’ve been hurt, emotionally speaking, is an accusation rather than a description of our own condition)
• “What you did was upsetting” (which is closer to expressing an emotion, but can mean that what was done is likely to make people upset rather than that the speaker is necessarily upset)
• “That’s disgraceful”

Different places for judgments and emotions
I’m not saying there’s no place in the world for judgments. If you’re in charge of something or someone, judging is an important process of clarifying whether or not things are going as you want them to go. You may judge that it was a bad idea for your child to have watched TV instead of doing homework, or that you would have been better off not going to the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. A policeman may judge that someone has violated a traffic law (although that person still gets their day in court), and a boss may judge that a worker isn’t performing well.

You may even want to judge someone else’s behavior for your own benefit to decide how to act toward them or whether or not to imitate them. Or you might express a judgment about someone else’s behavior to someone else or to the person in question in hopes of making an impression. Of course, this sometimes backfires, especially when speaking to the person being judged.

In most of our interactions with most people, we at best can only hope to influence the situation. We’re not usually in charge of our friends, acquaintances, people we see on the street, people we see in traffic, our siblings, and so on, and acting as though we are in charge tends to create problems rather than solve them. In these situations, if we want to truly communicate in hopes that the other person will understand and take our feelings into account, it becomes important to express how we actually feel rather than just what we think or judge.

Photo by Joe Gratz

If I were to have to pick the one largest problem I have getting things done in my life, it would be having too many priorities. Maybe you can relate … though I hope you can’t!

Roots of overcommitment
Part of the problem has to do with my personality: I love to consider new possibilities and think about new ways to do things, so I often come up with ideas that seem likely to pay off handsomely if I invest some time and effort. Though sometimes that has been the case and sometimes it hasn’t, usually it’s much easier to consider whether the idea itself is worthwhile than to consider whether or not it really fits in with my primary goal at that point in my life.

And I do mean “goal,” singular. We can adopt a lot of different priorities in our lives, but if we really want to achieve something difficult and effortful, like starting a new business or losing 50 pounds or learning Swedish from CDs, our chance of success plummets unless it is the only big goal we’re currently pursuing.

Why only one goal?
Accomplishing any big change in our lives means changing habits, and changing habits takes time (see “How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit?“), effort, attention, and thought. When we try to pursue more than one major goal at a time, all of these resources get divided among the goals, and this takes a difficult but doable process and makes it so overwhelming that few of us can possibly succeed. It’s as though we are trying to defend a city with a small army that should be just barely up to the job, but then divide our troops in two or three or more parts and send them to defend other cities. All the cities may be worth defending, it’s true, but in this kind of situation, all of them are likely to fall.

When it’s hard letting other goals go
While knowing this has helped rein in my enthusiasm for new projects, it hasn’t prevented me from going in too many directions at once. Ironically, writing this blog makes it more difficult for me to let go of multiple priorities: it’s hard to write about self-motivation and not feel as though you should be able to create it in all aspects of your life at once, even if what you’re writing is that this is an unsuccessful way to proceed.

And of course all of the different project I pursue do feel very important to me. It’s hard to look at any one of them and think that I should let it go, especially after I’ve put a huge amount of work into it.

Yet sometimes letting things go–or at least putting them away temporarily–is exactly the best thing to do. Even a goal that’s put aside can benefit from this, because instead of unending effort toward too many goals that fails to ever fully succeed, we can have efforts that succeed in getting us somewhere, and once we’ve reached a certain level–the new business is running smoothly and there are no immediate crises, or new eating and exercise habits have become second nature, or communicating in Swedish is going well–then we have the mental capacity, the time, and the focus to spend on something else, which might well turn out to be that goal we had to sideline to get things going.

But getting to that point, for those of us who are used to trying to juggle lots of new projects or priorities, is hard. My natural response to the idea that I have to cut back on projects is that all of my projects are too important to cut back on. Yet not setting some of these projects aside means that I’m only considering them important enough to half-try and then fail at. It may be painful to give up on the car being rebuilt in the garage, the new artistic effort that had so much promise, or on the professional development effort that promises a better job but takes too much time and feels too draining–but that’s exactly what we end up needing to do if there’s something else that really needs to take priority.

Ongoing priorities
There are also things many of us do on an ongoing basis that really aren’t that important, and it’s very rewarding to experiment with not doing these. These may be things like participating in clubs or groups that don’t add much to our lives, watching TV, or spending a lot of time and effort on vacations. Many of these activities will be related to entertainment (or in some cases, just killing time), which sounds a bit as though I’m advocating a life spent having no fun, but in truth, the activities that are most enjoyable to us as human beings are often the ones that are the most rewarding, like helping out friends, engaging with our families, or doing something that you do very, very well.

However important existing priorities, even though they make demands on time and attention too, don’t need to be discarded to work on a goal. If you decide that the essential thing for you to do is to buckle down and really finish the renovations on your home, that doesn’t mean it’s time to ignore your spouse and children, stop paying attention to your job, drop out of your twice-weekly basketball games, or cut off communication with friends. These ongoing priorities are not goals in the same way that something that requires a change of habit and a significant new investment of time is a goal. While any or all of these things may slow down accomplishing a new goal, if they are already priorities in your life, they aren’t going to require new habits to develop on a large scale–and it is that brain-changing process of habit change that makes goals happen.

Photo by Auntie P