Grantblings

Creative Mondays #026 – Creative Goals

If you’re anything like me, always busy, you can gain a lot by setting creative goals.  I’m not speaking of big lofty goals like: get a book published or have a gallery opening or have my play produced on the stage.  These are big creative goals.  I’m not saying those aren’t good goals to have, those are great goals to have.  I’m talking about smaller creative goals that will lead you to those bigger creative goals.

I am a big proponent of working day by day, bit by bit on achieving those big creative goals.  Those big goals don’t just happen overnight.  In order to get a play produced, you have to write it.  In order to have a gallery opening, you need to paint enough pieces to put into a gallery.  So you need to look at those goals and see what goals you can set right now to achieve those bigger goals you have in mind.

Recently, I’ve started planning things out for the week every Sunday evening.  I look at the week ahead and I jot down a list of things I want to accomplish by this time the following Sunday night.  I break down all the current projects I’m working on and then come up with some things I can, conceivably, get done during the week to get closer to accomplishing those goals.

For example, I’m currently working on a podcast called The Tales of Deputy Guppy.  Over the past few weeks I have the voice over artists come in and record their lines for the fourteen episodes of the season.  So right now, I have fourteen episodes worth of audio that ready to be edited and produced into final shows.  Now, I would love to be able to make one of my goals:

Edit the fourteen episodes of Deputy Guppy.

That, however, is a pretty big task and I have a ton of other things going on during the week, so it’s not going to get done no matter how much I want it to get done.  So, I break down the goal into something more manageable:

Edit one episode of Deputy Guppy.

That is doable.  In fact, I know I can do a little bit more so my goals then become:

Edit one episode of Deputy Guppy.

Choose the ‘selects’ for the next episode. (Selects are the takes by each voice actor that I really like and want to use in the final show.)

By doing this I have taken a near impossible task and broken it down into two little tasks that get me a step closer to achieving that big task.

Doing this also helps your brain wrap itself around completing that big task.  Telling myself I have to edit fourteen episodes in one week basically makes my brain shut down because it knows that that is a LONG boring week of being glued to a chair editing.  However, by breaking it down, my brain goes, “Oh I can do that and do that pretty quickly.”

And I’m not afraid of breaking down things even further.  If it’s going to be a super busy week, I’ll make fewer goals.  I will, however, do SOMETHING that gets me just a little bit closer to completing that big goal.

So why not try it this week?  Take one of your creative goals and break it down into smaller pieces.  Pieces big enough to be accomplished in a week’s time with the time you have available to put towards that goal.  Then focus on getting those small things done this week.  Then, at the end of the week, take the next little piece of that big goal and plan on getting that done the following week.  If you can do this, put your mind to it and really do it, you’ll see that your big goal gets completed in no time.

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What goal are you working towards right now.  How are you going to break it down into pieces you can tackle this week.  Let us know in the comments below!