Goal Setting

I have never really got the concept of setting goals. Once in a while, I have listed things on paper but rarely looked at them. 
 

I’m currently reading “Eat Pray Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. She mentions that the Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once suggested to his students that they write down the three things they most want in life. Any clashes between the items on the list mean future difficulties. Harmonious items would enable a better focus.    

I thought about the three things most important to me and found that it was easy to focus on these as all were areas that I wanted to advance and there were no clashes between the items.    

This is manageable. I have thoughts about exploring areas that I have read about or studied but haven’t had the energy to fully integrate them into my life. I’m starting to think that now is the time.    

The danger is that I might end up over committing myself to too many projects, which I’m sure is where I’ve become unstuck in the past. There must be a way of handling this so that I can do the things I really want to do while ensuring that I also do the things that must be done. Plus I know that I need rest time in between. I’m probably asking a lot of myself to navigate a path that I haven’t successfully handled in the past.    

But I like the idea that it’s not so important for me to write goals down. The magic of this approach seems to be in its simplicity. An extensive list of items needs to be written down and then perused just because it’s impossible to remember it all. But three items can easily be retrieved from the memory bank on command.    

Fortunately, it doesn’t matter what’s on my list. What matters is what I do with my time in order to progress these items. And my first note to self is to down tools and turn the computer off much earlier than I have in the past. This sounds easy to do but for a long-term computer person, it almost sounds like hypocrisy. But once I click the save button on this post, I promise I will do exactly this.