How I Stick to My Most Important Daily Goal

We all know I’m a bit of a goal person and I must say I do enjoy challenging myself. Life feels much more enjoyable when I have something to work towards.

You’ve probably often heard people criticize hustle culture or living for your work and so on. I feel like I’m constantly bumping into those kinds of posts on social media, and frankly, it does seem to fit this era of prioritizing comfort and ease over everything.

However, I’ve had both very easy-going and very challenging times in my life, and I can confidently say that I feel much more alive and happy during the latter. Easy life is fun for a few days, and then it starts to lose its appeal.

Of course, this only applies to me (and people like me), and I know that there are plenty of people who feel differently. That’s naturally perfectly fine, but it is important to know what group you belong to and ignore tips and comments that don’t benefit you.

Now, with that out of the way, I want to talk about my daily goals.

My current daily goals:

• write 1000 words of fiction
• read for an hour
• review vocabulary
• write 1 poem

The first one is the most important and I aim to stick to it, no matter what. The other ones are still waiting for better days in the near future when I’ll manage to keep my schedule a bit more efficient and carve some time for my vocabulary practice and dabbling in poetry.

There will always be bumps in the road

The single biggest challenge when it comes to any kind of goal is that there will always be hard days. It’s easy to set new goals and vow that you will stick to them every single day.

But what happens when you get sick, don’t get enough sleep, have some stressful problem to deal with, or a new season of one of your favorite TV shows drops on Netflix?

Will you still work on your goal any way you can, or will you let a few days pass, promising yourself that you’ll get right back to your routine tomorrow?

That’s one of those things that judge whether you will fail or succeed. That’s why you want to be prepared. You need to have a system, so that you know how you can handle setbacks and ensure that you will reach that end goal eventually.

You need to give yourself time to figure it all out

I think one of the biggest problems (especially when it comes to New Year’s resolutions) is that people come up with some new goal, start on it right away, and then give up when the first problem arrives.

Now, my main daily goal of writing 1000 words per day is always a struggle. It takes one or two hours per day, and having a full-time job and a fairly long commute doesn’t make it any easier. I’m also almost always sleep-deprived (one of the problems I’m working on).

However, now that it’s been seven months since I set myself this goal, I can finally report that it’s getting a bit easier. While it’s still challenging to reach that word count, not to mention writing anything passable, I’ve figured out how to structure my day so that I have time and energy to write, I’ve learned to focus better, and I know how to power through setbacks.

There’s still a lot to learn (and a backlog of 40,000 words due to holidays and sickness, that I don’t even want to think about), but it would have been silly to assume that I could have had it all figured out from the 27th May, the first day I began this goal.

How I stick to my daily goal

My job takes 9 hours of my day, and getting ready and commuting add almost 2 hours to my day. Naturally, making food, showering, and other basics take up time as well, to my daily disappointment and frustration.

Also, the unfortunate fact is that after a long day of work, I will of course be quite tired and it will be a challenge to write anything, even though all day I’ve been wishing I was at home writing.

So, I aim to write before I go to work, which is always a balancing act between getting enough sleep and getting enough words on the page before leaving for work. It’s doable, although sometimes waking up at 4.30 am, and sitting up to type a few hundred words in the darkness with freezing fingers is especially miserable.

But let me tell you, going to work knowing that you’ve already written 700 words makes it worth it. Going home having already hit the daily goal is almost baffling, like what do you mean I don’t have to do anything except maybe make dinner?

Every job and every situation in life is different, meaning that how you can accomplish a goal similar to this obviously varies. To my luck, we have a daily target at work, and once you reach it, no one really cares what you do. So, on a good day, I can get quite a lot of writing done at work.

Of course, most of this occurs during lunch breaks, meaning that I have to sacrifice socializing on most days.

Additionally, I aim to use my time on commute well, whether it’s reading or writing. I don’t enjoy writing on my phone, but that’s once again one of those sacrifices you make for your goal. 100 words on my way to work means 100 less when I come back home tired. You really have to take your goal seriously, or else it will fizzle quickly.

Before setting a big daily goal

First of all, you want to be sure that this is a goal that matters so much to you that you can stick to it every single day. This probably sounds too obvious to even mention, but I see people setting goals left and right without understanding that every goal requires sacrifice, even if it’s a very small and simple goal.

Assuming that you’re dead set on your goal, you then need to know what exactly it is that you are to do every day and how you will do it.

Most importantly, you need to figure out how you will find the time and energy to do it.

This is what it all really comes down to, doesn’t it? It’s easy to start reading for 30 minutes per day, until you have more things on your plate or your schedule changes.

Before you commit to a goal, you need to:

1. Know that you have the motivation for it
2. Figure out exactly what you are supposed to do
3. Know where you’re going to get the time to do it
4. Ensure you have enough energy for it
5. Plan for all the problems and challenges you think might occur
6. Choose what are the situations in which it is ok to skip your daily goal

The last one is important; there will be days when it will be practically impossible to stick to your goal. You might also want to cut yourself some slack on special days, or you might want to take breaks from your daily goal simply to keep your motivation up.

I myself usually don’t write when I’m on holiday, since it would take up so much of my time. I also don’t have to write when I’m sick, very stressed, or it’s a particularly special and busy day. Otherwise, I’ll rake up those words one way or the other, even if it means not getting enough sleep, or getting no free time at all.

Now you just need to get started

I hope I didn’t make daily goals sound too much of a challenge. But at the end of the day, if you do have big goals, you’re going to have to work for them and make sacrifices, there’s no way around it.

Adding something to your life means that something else has to go. Sometimes it’s a few minutes of your free time, sometimes it’s looking at your phone on the bus.

Now, if you want to change your life, you have to take action. It starts with taking the first step. Choose your goal, make a plan, and get started today. You’ll figure out the ins and outs of it along the way!