Part of my plan for 2017 was to say no to more short term things in favour of a long term approach. I don’t think I embraced this, and my scrawl on top of this objective on my plan – my way of marking what I thought I’d done well and what I hadn’t – says ‘not really’.
This kind of objective is always going to be a tough one to judge, and it would be very easy for this post to be my defence as to why I wasn’t more successful.
I could say many things: the last 12 months has been so busy and that has made it incredibly difficult to lift my nose up and look much more than a few weeks into the future, the kind of job I do – which means day-to-day plans are often aspirational rather than actually something which will happen – provides me with a short term culture that I constantly must challenge, and perhaps most importantly: I lost sight of my long term goal.
And that last one is important because it’s where my failure could really become a success (although I’m not changing the emoji, nor the scrawl). What is the purpose of a goal to be more long term by the end of the year than the trigger to develop a long term goal I didn’t realise I didn’t have.
Last night I flippantly asked Tim if he was looking forward to being 40, intending merely to make fun of the fact that we are in the dying days of the 4 months each year where he is a year older than me, and he pointed out that it is only about 11 years away from being true. And that kicked my thoughts back here.
What is my long term goal? What and who do I want to be? What do I want to achieve by the time I am 40 and how do I reconcile the need for not an aversion to short term in favour of long, but a need to build a mental framework for short term decisions which keeps me on the glide path?
That is my problem to solve for this year.
How did I do on my other goals?
This post was part of a series of posts organising my thoughts about how I did last year. You can also find out how else I did with my goals of 2017 in my other posts on the topic here, and sign up below to get an email whenever I post something new.
And finally, check out my aunty’s post from on her blog A Year Of Saying YES , where she reveals the tool I used to plan my 2017 (and my 2018).
