My partner said stopping my goal tracking meant my system had failed. He was wrong — I just earned a guilt-free holiday season. Here's how progress buys you permission to pause.
Something happened at the beginning of October last year: I stopped tracking my Latin and piano goals. Upon hearing this, Mr Cranky said, "If you're not tracking, that means your system has failed."
Horror! Drama! Calamity! ROAR has come to an end! Rexie is out of a job!
No, not really. T-Rexes are very hard to make redundant as they are so darned stubborn, and I'm sure that any attempt on my part to make Rexie retire and do whatever dinosaurs do when they no longer have official chomping duties would not have ended well ... for me, that is!
Plus, Mr Cranky was wrong: ROAR has not failed, and Rexie is now back on Latin supervisory duties with teeth that are sharper than ever.
The reason for my hiatus was that between April and September, I had completed a whole bunch of things: Ulysses, Farsi, the blog launch, and two work qualifications. I'd also made a good start on Latin, and a small start on piano.
But then, in September, something happened: my local department store put up its Christmas displays, and other shops put up their Halloween displays, and my Inner Five-Year-Old decided that the holidays had officially arrived. I did try to argue with her, but I couldn't talk her out of it. (You try telling a five-year-old that she can't eat chocolate Santas and play Christmas-themed video games for another three months. It's impossible!)
At this point, I noticed my goal progress, while not stopped completely, had drastically slowed down, and that my heart wasn't 100% in it any more. Horror! Drama! Calamity! What now?
The way I saw it, I had two options.
I chose option 2.
I put my Latin and piano goals on hold, bought and ate a chocolate Santa from the department store (in September), printed tracking sheets for Halloween and Christmas (also in September), and told Rexie that he was going to be chomping pumpkins and candy canes for the rest of the year.
In previous years, I would have given myself a hard time about this, and no doubt that little nagging voice in my head would have been whispering things like, 'You failed again', and 'You should be doing something productive'. But I was being productive – very productive, in fact – just on a different set of goals.
And I had a blast! Between October and December, I completed two Halloween tracking sheets (70 stickers in total) and three Christmas tracking sheets (105 stickers in total). I was still ROARing, but now applying the process to fun goals instead of more serious ones.
Here's the thing, though: those serious goals did not go away. The crazy family in my Lingua Latina textbook are still waiting with stories that really deserve their own Jerry Springer show, and my sheet music is open on my piano, reminding me that I'll soon be using it again.
In fact, I've added to both of those goals. I now have a couple of other Latin story books to supplement Lingua Latina, and I also bought two Udemy courses about sight-reading music and scales and arpeggios for piano.
The things I learned from my three-month experiment are:
And you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be doing the exact same thing for the last three months of this year. (Plus, I bought way too many Halloween and Christmas stickers and really need to use them 😄)
Carpe skateboard! 🦖🛹
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