Snowflake Challenge 2024 #1-2: SMART Goals
Jan. 3rd, 2024 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptChallenge #1 was to tidy and ensure your information is updated and correct. Given that not much has changed in the realm of "things that I am talking about to the journaling populace", it was mostly just looking over the sticky post and linking to it in the challenge. There may be a meditation on change in there, eventually, but for now, no.
Challenge #2 asks us to envision goals for the coming year.
As many regulars to this challenge and those who follow along here understand, goals are things that you can fail at, and if you have a brain like mine, failing at goals is an invitation for brainweasels to feast. So, I tend to shy away from goals, even though the time is past where I have to do much of them. There are goals on my evaluation for work, so I'm still trying to do those, but outside of work, goals don't generally get the nod.
Trying to build habits is a better and friendlier thing to aspire to. There's still the possibility of the goal weasels coming in and feasting, but habits are more forgiving, because habits have built into them the possibility that sometimes you take a day off from them, intentionally or otherwise, and you can restart habits immediately. It is easier to cultivate a practice than to achieve a goal, because the practice does not particularly care about improvement for improvement's sake, but instead, improvement comes from acquiring and practicing skills. There are sometimes projects desired, and those are usually what brings in the motivation for learning and practicing skills, but in at least one aspect of practice, the point of the practice is that you practice.
I spent a fair amount of time over the holiday/staycation I gave myself doing practice - writing the weekly book club entries and December Days, but also moving some of my single board computers off of the official Raspberry Pi OS and on to a different system (Arch Linux ARM), believing that it would be easier to keep them maintained and so they would conflict less with each other and have less issues with shuffling around devices, and also because in the intervening time, supposedly the Linux kernel and Firefox had caught up and could take advantage of the hardware acceleration available from those SBCs, so I was no longer tied into the specific operating system produced by that manufacturer. It went well, for the most part, and both machines that were converted are now purring along in their tasks and behaving better than they were before. It took quite a bit of time to get one of them back to the usual functionality, and to add in something that had been missing from the official releases, and to figure out how to get my old game controllers to work properly again, but this is a matter of practice, rather than one of acquiring new necessary skills. And being pretty patient while things compile. I also managed to move over and Director's annotate one more Pern book commentary, so there's only one more to go at this point. I accomplished my goals for that short-term period, then, in getting the machines figured out, keeping with the writing, and getting one more thing over. And then I had a surprise goal sprung on me when one of my other computers needed to be diagnosed after an update, which had me finally remove a boot parameter I had put in place to prevent random lockups many years before. It didn't seem like the lockups have persisted into this current time, so I'm hoping it will continue to work for us.
All these goals accomplishments might mean that I've finally internalized the whole "SMART goals" paradigm for what I'm trying to do with my life. (That is, goals are supposed to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, so that they avoid being brainweasel invitations.) A year is a longer timeframe than I usually set goals for, mostly because I know myself better now and that things that are year-long goals have to be broken down into smaller time frames, and then they also need to have reminders set for them so that I know when I've planned for the time I will need to make them happen, and I remember that I planned to use that time for that thing.
It's what makes the exchange circuit work so well for me, rather than doing a lot of epic writing things. They're usually small word counts, with specific time frames and limiting factors so I know what I'm writing and about what's requested to enjoy or avoid. It stops me from jam choice problems, and it lets me know when there has been enough effort applied that if I have an ending in mind, I can start writing it to make sure things get turned in on time. The format sidesteps some and provides answers to others of the major questions that would interfere with motivation and getting things done in the fannish realms. And it keeps me profoundly multi-fannish, while also giving me the novelty so much of my brain desires.
So, goals, such as they are for this year, are mostly the same as they have been for all years: Finish assignments, do signups, keep maintaining the technology and adding in new bits as needed, stay employed, pay the debts, save the cash where possible, and be the kind of person that has, so far, been a person that other people want to be around and do fun things with.
Challenge #2 asks us to envision goals for the coming year.
In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.
As many regulars to this challenge and those who follow along here understand, goals are things that you can fail at, and if you have a brain like mine, failing at goals is an invitation for brainweasels to feast. So, I tend to shy away from goals, even though the time is past where I have to do much of them. There are goals on my evaluation for work, so I'm still trying to do those, but outside of work, goals don't generally get the nod.
Trying to build habits is a better and friendlier thing to aspire to. There's still the possibility of the goal weasels coming in and feasting, but habits are more forgiving, because habits have built into them the possibility that sometimes you take a day off from them, intentionally or otherwise, and you can restart habits immediately. It is easier to cultivate a practice than to achieve a goal, because the practice does not particularly care about improvement for improvement's sake, but instead, improvement comes from acquiring and practicing skills. There are sometimes projects desired, and those are usually what brings in the motivation for learning and practicing skills, but in at least one aspect of practice, the point of the practice is that you practice.
I spent a fair amount of time over the holiday/staycation I gave myself doing practice - writing the weekly book club entries and December Days, but also moving some of my single board computers off of the official Raspberry Pi OS and on to a different system (Arch Linux ARM), believing that it would be easier to keep them maintained and so they would conflict less with each other and have less issues with shuffling around devices, and also because in the intervening time, supposedly the Linux kernel and Firefox had caught up and could take advantage of the hardware acceleration available from those SBCs, so I was no longer tied into the specific operating system produced by that manufacturer. It went well, for the most part, and both machines that were converted are now purring along in their tasks and behaving better than they were before. It took quite a bit of time to get one of them back to the usual functionality, and to add in something that had been missing from the official releases, and to figure out how to get my old game controllers to work properly again, but this is a matter of practice, rather than one of acquiring new necessary skills. And being pretty patient while things compile. I also managed to move over and Director's annotate one more Pern book commentary, so there's only one more to go at this point. I accomplished my goals for that short-term period, then, in getting the machines figured out, keeping with the writing, and getting one more thing over. And then I had a surprise goal sprung on me when one of my other computers needed to be diagnosed after an update, which had me finally remove a boot parameter I had put in place to prevent random lockups many years before. It didn't seem like the lockups have persisted into this current time, so I'm hoping it will continue to work for us.
All these goals accomplishments might mean that I've finally internalized the whole "SMART goals" paradigm for what I'm trying to do with my life. (That is, goals are supposed to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, so that they avoid being brainweasel invitations.) A year is a longer timeframe than I usually set goals for, mostly because I know myself better now and that things that are year-long goals have to be broken down into smaller time frames, and then they also need to have reminders set for them so that I know when I've planned for the time I will need to make them happen, and I remember that I planned to use that time for that thing.
It's what makes the exchange circuit work so well for me, rather than doing a lot of epic writing things. They're usually small word counts, with specific time frames and limiting factors so I know what I'm writing and about what's requested to enjoy or avoid. It stops me from jam choice problems, and it lets me know when there has been enough effort applied that if I have an ending in mind, I can start writing it to make sure things get turned in on time. The format sidesteps some and provides answers to others of the major questions that would interfere with motivation and getting things done in the fannish realms. And it keeps me profoundly multi-fannish, while also giving me the novelty so much of my brain desires.
So, goals, such as they are for this year, are mostly the same as they have been for all years: Finish assignments, do signups, keep maintaining the technology and adding in new bits as needed, stay employed, pay the debts, save the cash where possible, and be the kind of person that has, so far, been a person that other people want to be around and do fun things with.
