Facing a Challenge - Setting Goals

I can't wait to get started!  Hooray!  Oh my God, what did I commit myself to? November will be a writing month!!

November.  50,000 words.  Digital Writing Month. Academic Writing Month.  50,000 words.  I actually did the math.  50,000 written words means that I have to write 1,666.67 words each day.  OK, 1667.  Wait!  Don't I already do that?  Don't I already write more than that many words in the emails and other documents that I write for work?  Don't I clearly write more than that many?  I started to panic as I began reading the posts on Twitter, those who are overwhelmed by the challenge.  Well, this is the start of my journey.

Excitedly, I awoke this morning at 4 a.m.  Don't know why my body chose to wake up at that awful hour, for no apparent or good reason, but I did wake up and I had writing on my mind.  So, after 40 minutes of reading email and twitter and thinking about writing, I actually decided to write.  Thankfully for anyone who reads this, I didn't write my ramblings here.  But I decided to write my goals for the month.  And here is what I discovered.

In writing my goals, I started writing them as, "I want to..."  After rereading two goals, I decided that "I want to..." was too weak of a start.  It's like dreaming to leave your house while never getting out of bed.  Like a friend of mine says, "Ya just can't get there, from here."  So, I changed the start of my goals from "I want to..." to "I'm going to..."  I felt better about this because it implied action rather than just desire.  But, when I got to my personal goals, I felt weak about the "I'm going to..." beginning because while it implies action, it doesn't actually require or direct it.  Hmm, may be all of those life coaches are right when they direct you to write your goals like you are already doing them or achieving them?  May be that's why they make the big money?  So, now I need to go back to my goals, revisit and rewrite them.  I want to do this anyway because I want to make them portable.  Rather than words on a document on my computer, I want them to be my map that I carry around with me.  I can pull it up and review it so that I know that I'm heading in the right direction; so I can refer to it when I feel like I'm getting lost. 

Between my writing document that I started and this post, I've already written over 1,900 words.  That exceeds my daily goal, and it was extremely easy to reach.  See!  I was right.  No reason to panic, this will be easy.  But I have a feeling that if I stick with this, I will accomplish some (wonderful) unintended consequences along the way.  I'll keep you posted on my progress.