The New Way to Set Goals Part 2 | Sputtering

My next January goals included: read scriptures, exercise, having a morning planning session, getting up at 7:00 am, which would, of course, be facilitated by the final goal of going to bed by 11:30 pm.

The results were mixed.  I had streaks of reading my scriptures everyday followed by streaks of not getting it done. I learned that it's really painful to get up at 7:00 especially on the days I was going to bed after 11:30.  For me, I need a minimum of 7.5 hours of sleep.  But I do much better on 8 hours.  Consistently depriving myself of needed sleep has been very ineffective.

Toward the end of the month, Wendell learned that he has Type 2 Diabetes.  It wasn't welcome news. But as Wendell's morning schedule changed to include consistent exercise, it threw my mornings for a loop and I was scrambling to get traction in my morning activities again.

Meanwhile, I was really struggling to check the going-to-bed box because I couldn't figure out what "counted."  Did I have to be asleep by 11:30?  What if I had prayers said, teeth brushed, contacts out and I was lying in bed?  What if I was just in the bedroom and Wendell and I were talking?  I honestly couldn't figure out when I could check the box and when I couldn't.  And Wendell and I often had different opinions about it.

"Oh, look!" I said one night as I put on my PJs.  "It's 11:25, I've made my goal!"

"You're not even in bed," Wendell countered.  "You still have contacts in, you have to brush your teeth...  This is totally not going to bed by 11:30.  It might be 11:45 before you're actually done."

By the 20th of January I wasn't tracking anything, which meant that except for my new habit of kneeling to pray, I was not accomplishing any of my goals.

The New Way to Set Goals Part 1

Following Gretchen Rubin's system of setting goals from The Happiness Project, I've been tackling a handful of goals each month and each evening I either give myself a check mark (I did it!) or a dash (I didn't do it).   This system, drawn from the journals of Benjamin Franklin, has been astonishingly effective.  (You can find all sorts of downloads from Gretchen here.  But it's this one that has been my favorite.  I simply scroll to the bottom and print the final blank one.)

The next step in goal setting has been to not beat myself up about goals that aren't working.  I've given myself the opportunity to reevaluate each goal and make changes as necessary, always using the framework of following my personal commandments.

With, "The Savior is the center," as my number one personal commandment, I knew the big change that I needed for January was to kneel to pray.

A couple of years ago, Wendell and I went on a trip to Las Vegas for a car dealer conference.  There, I slipped and fell creating, what I learned later, was a hairline fracture in my knee cap.  There's not much to be done with such an injury, so the best thing I could do, was stay off of it.  Including for prayers.  It wasn't fun, but as time passed, my knee has mostly healed.  I'll admit that I still can't kneel on a hard surface.  But this not kneeling had become a habit that I needed to shake.  At the bare minimum, I could kneel for couple and personal prayers in my bedroom (on carpet) using a pillow for added cushioning.

In the Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis reminds us, "Whatever their bodies do affects their souls." Therefore, if I kneel before my Maker, my spirit is so much more likely to be in tune with His Spirit and my will is more easily conformed to His.  This allows me, to keep the Savior at the center of my life.

This was an easy goal, in a sense.  It was one I was able to accomplish perfectly instantly.  Few goals are like that.  But at the end of January, I removed this goal from my tracking sheet and am still keeping it perfectly.  This is what happens when a goal becomes a habit.