Scheduling Goals, Happiness, and Getting Sh*t Done

I’ve been re-reading Wishcraft by Barbara Scher, which should be required reading for anyone trying to construct a new life after academia. A friend of mine gifted it to me years ago and I’ve gifted it to friends since. First published in 1979, I still think it’s the best of the “set some goals and achieve them” genre. Parts of it seem dated now (writing things on index cards! Calling people on the phone! Going to the library!), but its timeless advice and wisdom helps people rediscover their deepest dreams and make a plan to achieve any goal. Most dangerously, Wishcraft has resurrected some of the goals I’d discarded years ago as impractical and unrealistic.

My biggest dream is to be a published, professional writer. Like, the kind of writer who gets paid for writing. I’ve wanted to be a professional writer since I was five, which should have been my first clue that it was a serious and important goal. I nevertheless spent many years assuming that being a writer in life was as impossible as it was impractical. Wishcraft reminded me that what I want still matters in life. I started taking my goal of being a writer seriously again a few weeks ago. So seriously, in fact, that I’ve decided to just start acting like a professional writer, despite not actually being paid for writing (yet). This week, I got my writing practice started again and wrote daily, just like I imagined Serious Writers doing.

But “being a writer” is still a vague goal without any endpoint.

In the past, I’ve been guilty of creating exciting and interesting goals and doing absolutely no work to reach them. I just expect to someday reach my goal with little or no effort on my part, as if the act of setting goals sets some kind of process in motion. (Plot spoiler: it doesn’t.) One of my big goals (from my last post) is writing a novel. I have quite literally wanted to write a novel my entire life, so its a serious goal, not just a passing fancy. Writing a novel is a nice goal because it gets to the dream of being a writer and has a clearly defined, tangible marker of success (finishing writing the novel). However, it is also a giant goal and I have no idea how I will possibly accomplish this. But here’s what I know: it will not happen without some serious planning and action on my part.

Planning steps to reach my goals and scheduling them on the calendar is the only way I’m going to get anything done in life. I’ve now got time scheduled into my monthly and weekly planner for what I’ve come to call “goal and happiness work.” Right now, I’m scheduling two evenings a week and a weekend afternoon for specific goal and happiness work. (Writing practice is still daily, but I’ve got some other goals that I’m working on too. I want to host writing retreats and give walking tours, which are also now on the calendar.) Every week, I make a weekly list of things that I need to do then (here’s the magic part) put them on the calendar and do them.

Here’s how I’m going about planning to reach goals, using the goal of writing novel as an example.

If my goal is to write a 250 page novel in a year, say, I need to break it down into smaller milestones that I can reach. I’d want to figure out how much I’d need to write monthly. Doing some math, I’d have to write a little more than 20 pages a month I might decided that 20 pages makes for a nice chapter length, so maybe my monthly goal is one 20 page chapter a month.

Wall Calendar:

On my master calendar, I’ve got specific monthly goals plotted for the next 18 months. In my last post, I talked about making deadlines (in pen!) for goals and then planning backwards from the big goals and scheduling this all on a multi-month or year calendar. With the novel, I’d schedule a chapter per month. I love having the wall calendar, because I see it every day. Big goals sometimes get hidden in planners or worse, never written down at all and then we wonder why we can’t figure out how to get there. Whenever I get anxious and freaked out and start wondering what the hell I’m doing with my life, I look at my wall calendar.

If I’m going to get the novel written in a year, June of 2018 would be my target date. I’d want to schedule one chapter per month, which would also tell me when to start. Since I’m estimating a year from start to finish, I’d need to start now. On my monthly goal list for each month, I’d write chapter a month as a goal.

Weekly Planner:

I was using a Bullet Journal until a few weeks ago. I like the Bullet Journal model of keeping a daily log of activities and I don’t mind having to number the pages. I also like the sense of mindfulness that I got out of using the bullet journal. Lamentably what wasn’t working for me about it was the lack of a weekly calendar and some difficulty planning for future events. [I think the creator of the Bullet Journal himself notes the problems with future planning, as do users.] So I switched to this planner instead and love it. I still do a lot of the things that I used to do with the Bullet Journal (check boxes for to dos, log of daily activities, jotting down ideas), but the weekly calendar structure works better for me.

So assuming that I’m going to write a 250 page novel in a year, I’d need to write four or five pages a week. Let’s say five. I’d schedule this in to my weekly calendar as a goal (write five pages this week). Turns out, five pages a day is like, one page a day of writing. So there’s my daily goal (write one page today). Weekly and daily goals are scheduled in my planner.

Daily Actions journal:

I’m keeping track of the little steps that I take every day on an Excel spreadsheet. I note what I’ve done each day and figure out any next steps. I find it helpful to keep track of what I’ve done weekly. It helps me see that even when I don’t think I’ve accomplished anything, I’ve actually done more than I think. The daily actions list tracks my list of next steps, so I know what I need to do next.

Planning meeting:

On Sunday evenings, I hold planning meetings with myself. I assess what I’ve accomplished over the week and what I still need to do. I look at my monthly goals, which are broken down into smaller steps. I review my progress for the week and see if I’m on target to meet my weekly and monthly goals. If I’m not, I figure out what I need to do to catch up or I adjust the dates I’ve set for smaller milestones. I figure out exactly what I need to do when. And then (the magic again) I put the things I need to do on a calendar and do them.

Planning goals and putting them on a calendar, by the way, doesn’t set anything in stone. Dates are flexible because I can’t predict the future. In the next year, I might move, get offered a job, or start a public speaking circuit. Ain’t no thing. Just adjust the calendar.

 The result of doing all of this planning is that there’s a specific STRUCTURE that keeps me moving forward and on track. Since I’ve been doing this, I literally never leave my house without a very clear idea about what I need to accomplish that day. Even more amazing might be the fact that I’m actually accomplishing those things.

Off to plan some more goals and reach them. :)

New Goals, Post-PhD Style

The first few months (okay, maybe a year or so) after deciding leaving academia, I felt romantic nostalgia for what I’d left behind. I reminisced about classmates, my research, writing in my pajamas, and having institutional library access. (Confession: I still wish I had institutional library access.) With some time and distance from academia, I now see it in a different, perhaps more realistic way, complete with adjunct exploitation, corporatization, and structural inequalities. Now I’m finally to the point in my post-PhD journey in which I’m looking forward more than looking back at what I left behind.

So I’ve decided to run towards the awesome. I’m much more interested now in finding and creating a life that works for me, rather than one the requires fitting myself into impossible boxes. I want to create the best life that I can, one that I’m absolutely thrilled to be living. I want a life that’s meaningful and filled with engaged and creative work. I am not interested at all in living a life that seems like second best or a sorry consolation prize for not getting an academic job. I want work that draws on all of my unique talents and skills, work that is a natural extension of who I am and what I value, like the kind of work that only I could possibly be doing.

I recently read some goal setting and getting books. I decided to try my hand at applying their wisdom to the post-PhD.  I learned that envisioning and creating something new and exciting in the post-PhD has two steps:

1. Defining and creating new goals
2. Attaching the goals to a structure

I like goals. Point me towards one and I’ll work like hell to get it, provided that I want it badly enough. Getting a PhD was a perfect goal for me, as it had a defined end point and clearly marked milestones. Left to my own devices, I realized that creating new goals is hard. After finishing the PhD, I didn’t feel like I had any goals. The next logical step would have been book publication, but without an academic job, academic publication didn’t feel very compelling as a goal. I also wasn’t sure that academic goals matched my personal goals anymore. I decided that any new goals had to conform to my values and the things that I love in life.

Without some kind of school or external goals, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. So I got very serious about figuring out some new goals and did some daydreaming. I thought about what I wanted more of in my life and what I wanted less of. I thought hard about personal values. They included creativity, place, community, curiosity, and perseverance. I also thought about the ideas that thrilled me the most and prioritized those.  

Turns out, I have lots of different goals.

• Being a writer
• Writing and publishing a novel
• Hosting a writing retreat three times a year
• Giving writing workshops
• Creating a group for therapeutic writing for trauma survivors
• Living in Mexico
• Publishing freelance articles
• Creating and giving a walking tour
• Creating a study abroad program
• Giving a TED talk
• Teaching history again
• Creating some kind of collective writing project

Some of the things on this list are short term goals and some are long term. Some of the goals aren’t really goals, but rather dreams. Being a writer, for example, is a lifestyle dream rather than a concrete goal. Writing and publishing a novel, on the other hand, is an actual concrete and real thing that I can work towards. But it still seemed huge and unmanageable. (I also had to make a concerted effort to not to listen to the negative voices in my head who helpfully asked who the hell I thought I was to be even thinking about pursuing dreams.) I broke novel writing down into smaller, more manageable steps. The steps include brainstorming an idea for a novel, writing an outline, completing a certain number of chapters,  finishing a complete rough draft, revising, finding an agent, getting the book to a publisher, etc etc etc. Given enough time, I could break down any of these things into little concrete tasks that are actually doable. I could, for example, brainstorm an idea for my novel. Like today. Like now.

So even though I now had a neat list of manageable steps, I still couldn’t quite figure out how I was going to get from here to there. I needed a structure that moved me logically from one step to the next. I never thought about structure when I was in graduate school, largely because it just surrounded me. (Fish don’t know they’re wet.) The structure was external and predefined by my professors, department, graduate college, and university. I created the structure for the classes I taught, but even that was defined by the sixteen week semester.

Creating my own structure felt a little scary. When I’ve tried to reach goals on my own in the past, I’ve often approached them using the strategy created by the Underpants Gnomes of South Park in their famous three phase business plan:

1. Collect underpants
2. ????
3. Profit

(Plot spoiler: the Gnomes’ plan did not work and they did not profit. Sorry.)

Working on goals this way literally never works for me because I have no commitment and no end date. I have vague ideas that I’ll keep working until “someday” I’ll reach a goal and then some other things will happen. Mostly I end up losing interest because I can’t seem to get anywhere.

Working backwards to avoid the Underpants Gnomes fallacy, I took all of my concrete goals and set dates to reach them. I tried to make the dates reasonable, but also not give myself time to NOT do them. I don’t particularly like to work under pressure, but I do find that I need to create a bit of a sense of urgency so that I get things done. In a truly terrifying moment, I then wrote the dates on my calendar in pen. Working backwards, I figured out when I’d need to do all of the little tasks in order to meet the goals on their target dates.

The big milestones that I identified are now plotted on a multi-year monthly calendar. The little goals are now scheduled in my planner. I literally have a list of little things to do every single day to get to my big goals. Even though I created the structure and could abandon or change it at any time, it feels concrete and doable enough to compel me along towards the finish line.

I’m still doing a lot of experimenting about how, exactly, I’m going to achieve anything on my goal list (how would I could I possibly give a TED talk?), but I think I’m on my way. More on goals to come.

Repurposing My PhD

I've been reading all of these non-fiction books about FINDING YOUR ULTIMATE PURPOSE IN LIFE lately. I've been binging on library books: Grit, by Angela Duckworth, Pivot by Jenny Blake, Presence by Amy Cuddy, and Originals by Adam Grant. I'm thankful and grateful for all of the reading apps on my phone.

I started reading these books because I've felt purposeless since finishing my PhD in 2015.  I've lost a lot of direction and momentum. Graduate school and the traditional professor track had provided a ready-made blueprint for where I thought I wanted to go in life. I had prefabricated five year plans that included a publishing schedule and future research projects. When I stepped off that track, I felt like the floor had fallen out from under me and I was left running on thin air like Wily Coyote before free falling into nihilistic nothingness. (As I've said before, leaving academia feels like the worst breakup in the history of everything.) Without clear next steps, I charged in random directions without any real ideas of what I wanted to do in life. I couldn't see the future without my academic research or a university job. I was desperate to figure out a new direction, but didn't know how to get started. I had a serious life problem that I needed to solve.

I put my PhD problem solving skills to work to figure out what to do about my current doldrums.  I read a lot of books, thought about them, and wrote some stuff. My living room this week is covered with sheets of paper with endless lists: personal values, things I liked to do as a kid, what I like to do now, what I want to be when I grow up, accomplishments I'm proud of, how I want to make an impact in the world, strengths, marketable skills, visions, knows, unknowns, can't knows, want to knows, preferences, likes, dislikes, my Myers-Briggs type indicator (INFP), and assorted self-assessments. If knowledge really is power, then surely self-knowledge is self-power.

I started reading Angela Duckworth's Grit this week and thinking about how it pertains to the post-PhD life. Duckworth argues that grit, the combination of passion and perseverance, predict success to a much greater degree than talent. There's quite a bit of public and academic debate over the merit of the central premise of Grit, some of which you can read here, here, and here. (But seriously, it's kind of cool that some social science research has entered into public debate and conscious.) Regardless of whether talent or grit predicts success (or maybe it's like so much humanities research and more complicated than we previously thought?), I found some of Duckworth's ideas useful for thinking about my current situation.

Even as I found myself nodding in agreement over certain parts of the book, I felt a creeping sense of shame. Although Duckworth identifies PhD people as pretty gritty (you kind of have to be to do a PhD), I wondered how grit applied to the people who decided to leave academia. After all, hadn't I given up on the academic job market and dreams of a tenure-track job? I gave up and gave in when things got tough. I quit. If anything, my experiences on the academic job market showed how little grit I had. I felt like the least gritty person ever. I should have tried harder, I thought and blamed myself accordingly.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that reading my personal PhD story as one of failure and as evidence of a lack of grit was only one possible interpretation.

I went back to the zillions of lists that I'd made, searching for a common theme and purpose. After re-reading all of the lists, I asked myself what the biggest purpose for my life was that I could imagine. The answer came without any thought. It dawned on me so naturally that it felt like breathing.

My life purpose is helping other people understand the world better.

When I think back on everything I've done in my life or wanted to do, everything always hinges on helping other people understand the world better. My academic research. My writing. My teaching. My Peace Corps service. My blog. Even my photography aims to help people see the world in a slightly different way, often using unusual angles to challenge perspective.

Another way to think about my post-PhD story is this: much as I said last week, that graduate school is only a means to an end, so too is the professoriate. Academia is really just ONE possible way to help other people understand the world better. Other ways of reaching my overarching goal of helping other people understand the world better. I know this because I made lists about it. To paraphrase Angela Duckworth, sometimes we have to give up on lower level goals because they are untenable, but this doesn't mean that we have to give up on the bigger, overriding life-level goals.

I may have left the professoriate, but truthfully, its just a means to an end, not an end unto itself. For me, the tenure-track was only one way that I could have achieved my big life goal.  Academia was a mid-level goal in the pursuit of something bigger. It's okay to give up on the idea of the tenure-track academic job, as long as I'm focused on my bigger life compass goal.

And I have to say that in terms of helping other people understand the world better, I'm actually pretty good at it. History is the main vehicle that helps me to do this, but even history isn't the only way to get to where I want to go. So now I get to figure out some new lower level goals that are going to help me get to my bigger life goal.

In other words, I need to make another set of lists. Possibility abounds. :)