One thing is for sure, plans never go to plan. Life happens… there’s a family emergency, your laptop breaks, you get called into work.
But you have goals you want to achieve and plans you’ve made!
So how do you keep making progress towards your goals when life throws you curve balls?
I recently set up a new routine to try to help me get things done every week. I scheduled tasks like writing this newsletter, along with writing, recording and editing a video every week. And things were going well for a while… then I got sick with a cold that lasted for weeks!
Routine and consistency went out of the window.
But I did learn 5 things that meant I made progress in spite of life having other plans.
5. Set your non-negotiables
If you’re working towards a goal, what are the things that you absolutely cannot drop?
For me, this newsletter is one of them. It’s one of the reasons why I designed this newsletter to have no photo thumbnail, so that i can write and publish it without the extra pressure of sourcing an image.
If life gets super busy what would you make sure you squeezed in no matter what that moves you closer to your goals? It could be a workout, eating healthily or journaling for 5 minutes everyday.
4. Let it go
Life goes through seasons and sometimes you need to prioritise particular areas of your life such as work, your family or your health.
When you’re focussing your time and efforts dealing with that, other things are going to slide. You have to be ok with that.
For me, this meant not scripting or recording and videos until I was better. It was frustrating, but I had to let it go. There’s no point wasting energy beating myself up about it.
3. Do what you can, when you can
Really focus on self-awareness and pay attention to how much energy you have. If you can, try to adapt what you do to match your low and high energy days.
You could just do the minimum viable version of your task on low energy days. For example, instead of applying for a new job, research the company and make some bullet point notes for your cover letter.
Some days, even doing the minimum viable version would be too much. So see if there are other things you can do that will move you closer to your goals instead.
For example, even when I had higher energy days over the last month, I wasn’t well enough to come up with good ideas for videos, so I worked on my website instead.
2. Adapt and change
When we’re at our busiest, we’re forced to consider how we can save time and multitask because it’s the only way we can get everything done.
Sometimes these changes actually work out better than what you were doing before!
Perhaps you usually call your friend and catch up in the evening after work, but this time you needed to call them while driving somewhere instead. But it actually worked out better because you had the evening free to spend with your partner.
So see if there’s any changes you actually want to keep from this busy season.
1. Two minutes’ progress is still progress
When we’re busy, tired and ill it can be hard to get motivated to do anything towards our goals because the tasks feel too huge.
As a new YouTuber, it currently takes me 3.5 hours to write a 10 minute YouTube script. Even looking at that written down here feels daunting!
But, if i break it down into smaller chunks it’s far less overwhelming. If i just think, spend 2 minutes writing a title idea, or write two bullet points for the outline, or write one line for the script, then it’s more manageable.
After two minutes I’m usually engaged with the task and do a bit more but getting started is always the hardest part.
Main takeaways
Making progress towards your goals is extra challenging when life happens.
But by choosing your non-negotiables, accepting that some things will slide, doing what you can, adapting, and remembering that even 2 minutes progress is still progress, you’ll still move towards your goals.