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Smarting Goals, Getting Oganised.

Conflicting goals are very common, I'm finding out. What is most important? What is the one that makes a real difference to your life. This is where I have to get real. I have quite a few. Some are day-dreams - kinda like completing my novel and putting it on Amazon. Others are tedious but will have real life value, however take a lot of effort and effort to push through.

So all my goals make a difference. Some give me hope and fuel my future dreams and ambitions. Others are more realistic but humdrum since they are work related. Put it this way, life is more than work. So I guess there lies my conflict. One is about professional development and the other is about creative development. However professional development takes up more time and on a deeper level lacks the satisfaction a creative work would give me.

Anyway enough moaning about things. So I've SMARTed my professional development goal, which I've been calling the personal goal.

So Specific - I want to complete the last module of my qualification.

Measureable. Yes it is. Breaking goal down to tasks I realise I have five parts - each can be further broken into steps. I can tick each off as I go.

Attainable. Well I wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't. Boring but attainable.

Relevant and Realistic: Yeah, I need to. In fact I often get a few expressions of horror and disbelief that it's taken me this long. But as I said, I find it boring. There may be an financial reward to getting it done, but that also is another goal in itself. Nothing comes easy.

Time scale. I'd take a whim to think December but having gone for a professional development conference I think I'd slightly misjudged the amount of time. Basically pulled that time out of a hat. So having revisited the goal and put a realistic time frame, I'm looking at March 2016. This fits factors in contingency time and all that lark.

To be fair that is probably the biggest obstacle to getting other goals done. That is kind of my number one goal.

I guess what is missing is MOTIVATION. WHY AM I DOING THIS? WHAT IS DRIVING ME? The reasons I started off this qualification are now redundant. Obsolete. My life has changed so much and it’s taken a while so it’s all gone. I started it because of the flexible lifestyle and strong job market, not for passion of the profession. However things didn’t pan out that way, so the motivating factor had lost steam. However I’m nearly there. Lesson. Do something you love, rather than for the benefits you think you’d get. Because if those benefits change, the goal may lose the appeal. Luckily for me, I like what I do - a little more than a job that pays the bill. But ‘like’ is very different from love or passionate.

Anyway I've broken my goal into steps and writing this has made me realise maybe I need to focus on this and put others on hold. But the thing is I like to write. So maybe I'll just read books and write short stories in draft. Or maybe just write ten minutes every day otherwise I'd feel I'm treading water in other things I really want to do. My passion. All work and no play makes Bigga Day very dull. So dull. Really dull.

So that's sorted then. I’ll focus on the professional goal, and do five-ten minutes timed writing on the other stuff.

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