Manageable goals and finishing

Last week my dad asked me to tighten a leaking nut that connects to his washing machine. Thanks to my intervention, the drip became a squirt, and while trying to remove the hose, the squirt became a gush. I’d knocked something loose in a connection below the valve and I had to run into the basement to turn off the water. It was enough of a fiasco to convince me to never touch plumbing again.

A sense of self-efficacy is important to setting goals. Failure can sometimes crush self-efficacy, but an even more insidious killer of motivation is consistently not finishing projects.

One of the main reasons I don’t finish goals is because I make commitments that are beyond my current capability. I’m going to start a four-step process to whittle down my commitments to a manageable size.

1. Run Experiments: Should the project be a commitment or an experiment? An experiment is something I can try and if it’s not working out, abandon. If I’m clear about this up front, I won’t feel I’ve failed to finish a commitment that maybe wasn’t that essential to start.
2. Reduce Overall Scope: Can I change the overall scope of a project to a smaller scope that I’m capable of finishing? Usually, my ideas grow in scope to something I can’t finish. I need to learn a habit of reducing scope instead.
3. Break Off a Component: Can I focus on a component of the full project? If I want to write a novel, can I commit instead to writing a first chapter, or create a world-building bible?
4. Pick a Cadence: How can I reduce the larger project to smaller well-defined sessions? If I’m committing to writing a first chapter, I can pick a manageable cadence of writing 500 words each day for a week.

Key to this whole process is to be realistic about my current capabilities and stop the grandiose schemes.