Goals and Ambitions: Finding Motivation During Those Final Few Days of an Old Year!

Finding motivation during the last few days of a year can be challenging. At least, I've always found it rather challenging.

You get past Christmas and have the awareness that in less than a week it's gonna be New Year's Eve and ramping yourself up to work hard for the five days in between can be really difficult. I remember back when I worked in the IT industry, it was supposed to be "work as usual" between Christmas and New Year's but because nobody got docked for not showing up it was essentially a ghost town. There'd be a handful of stalwart programmers there, enjoying the fact that the place was quiet and deserted... and that was about it.

Even so, I do find plenty of things to do during these days. Mostly, I'm sitting down and making lists and schedules of everything I need to get done for my home businesses immediately after the turn of the year. I also make lists of all the facts and figures that need to be recorded on the morning of the 1st of January to provide a sort of static snapshot of where the year ended.

Maybe I'm a little anal retentive about getting that stuff accurately recorded, but it's one of the few times where I'm actually sharply oriented towards numbers. If we are going to "make comparisons," they damn well be accurate!

I typically don't do New Year's resolutions, and I don't really do ”goal setting”, per se. I prefer to lay down some pretty general guidelines for myself, which typically include a few ”minimum must reach” numbers and benchmarks. I don't like to be too ambitious with these, because there are few things more frustrating and depressing than getting about two months into the new year and realizing that you have no chance in hell of reaching the goals you set for yourself.

Of course, the way we set goals varies a lot from person to person. I happen to be one of those people who work really well when there's a lot of slack in terms of where the acceptable endpoint might be, and when we need to reach it. Other people do their best work when they feel like they're constantly ”under the gun.” Frankly, I lived with that feeling while I had what you might call a ”regular” job, and I hated every moment of it!

Actually, I ended up with stress-related stomach ulcers, but that's a whole different story!

Thankfully, I am now self-employed and have the ability to set goals that fit my temperament as well as the kind of work I'm doing. Since I don't have any great ambition to ”conquer the world,” I tend to set fairly modest goals that serve primarily the purpose of making sure that we're able to pay our basic bills and not suffer undue hardship.

And since the goals are modest, I usually get to look back on my "to do list" for the year and can cross off a lot of items.

So, for now, I'm going to go back to my quiet process of deciding what to turn into an actual goal for 2022, and what to simply "let be." It then gets to percolate till the weekend, when I'll turn it into something more concrete.

Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Do you have any specific plans for 2022? Or are you even THINKING about next year? Are you generally productive during the last week of the year, or is it your time off? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 20211228 20:52 PDT
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