You Don’t Need A Goal For Everything

You don’t need a goal for everything.  There, I said it.  

I know in today’s fast-paced world where everyone is frantically trying to beat the competition, we set goals for everything we do.  In fact, it was just a little over a month ago when I had a conversation with a colleague about how busy we both were.  I’m sure you’ve had that conversation recently, being busy seems to be all people talk about lately.  So, what did two intelligent yet busy professionals do? We set a goal, of course.

I actually stopped what I was doing to choose a random day about a month out where my goal is to do nothing.  A free day.  A day to not have somewhere to be or something to be responsible for.   When I added that to my calendar, I immediately felt a false sense of relief.  I set aside time in the future for me.  Perfect.  The only problem is that goals like that don’t work.  

I woke up this morning and checked my calendar for the day ahead and what do I see?  That my “Trish’s Day to Do Nothing” is tomorrow.  Tomorrow!  That happens to be the day my son’s football team has their first playoff game.  It’s also the day that the cheerleading squad I coach has our CheerFest competition.  There are also several other to-do’s during the day.  I immediately felt like a failure because I didn’t meet my goal.

Then I thought about it.  I set a goal for something I never should have.  If my goal is for free time, I need to actively look at what I am committing to and cut down on that.  Only then will I have some free time.  It’s like that at work too.  If we set goals for every little move we make without thought to workload or time available, we will never reach those goals.  So, we set ourselves up for failure.

How about you?  Do you set goals you either don’t intend to reach or that you have good intentions about but you know you will never have the time to dedicate?  What advice do you have for the “busy” people who are over-thinking it?  Share in the comments with me.