I love a good mnemonic (you know, the memory device we use to help us remember things.) Like the acrostic HOMES for the Great Lakes or the acronym Every Good Boy Does Fine for musical notes.

There’s also one for goal setting: SMART. Goals should be:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound

Goal setting is one of my favorite things and I follow these rules. But, guess what? Probably like some of you, I don’t always reach my goals. In fact, it seems that year after year the goals in my sparkly journal (yes, it’s sparkly, don’t judge) are often the same as the year before. Sometimes I make a little progress, but rarely do I cross off a goal with a big flourish of my sparkly pen (yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re just jealous, cause your pen is stupid black.)

So recently I have been feeling a little restless, a little bored, a little anxious, a little bit flatlined. If you know me, you know these are not normal feelings for me. I am the busy one, the one who always has projects going, the one who keeps a pretty full calendar. The one who is rarely bored, anxious or restless. But there I was.

I have been spending hours on the sofa, in my sweet nest, doing word puzzles, drinking endless cups of coffee, watching Brit Box, and making lists of all the things I wanted or needed to accomplish that day. The next day I would make the same list again. And the next and the next.

Turns out that setting goals is not the same as reaching them.

My sweet friend Tamala says the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. We used to approach jobs this way at Dallas Media Center when a customer would bring in four huge bins full of photos, slides, videos, and other memorabilia that we were to distill onto a single hard drive. She would look at me and say calmly, “One bite at a time.”

And SNAP! the job’s a game.

Ok, that’s Mary Poppins, but you get the idea. Standing there looking at it all and saying, “Let’s get this done by the end of summer,” and then walking back to our desks didn’t get us very far. We made a plan of attack and got her done.

So I made a plan of attack. A plan to actually accomplish my goals instead of just making a continuous list of them. And here’s the acronym for it: GPA. Goals Plan Action

1. Write a new book
2. Walk more (read that “lose weight”)
3. Eat better (read that “lose weight”)
4. Fix the electrical issues in my house
5. Fix the landscape issues in my yard
6. Get out of the website business (this has nothing to do with losing weight, but will really lower my stress.)

I probably told you my goals already, but I will reiterate here. And I bet some are similar to yours.

Pretty much these have been my goals ever since I became a member of The Worst Club Ever. But I realized recently (very recently) that I needed to actually DO a few things if I were going to keep from having a complete meltdown.

1. Get off my butt
2. Get off my phone
3. Get on my treadmill
4. Get out of my kitchen
5. Get on my computer
6. Call an electrician
7. Go to a nursery
8. Get out of the website business

More goals! But smaller chunks in order to polish off the elephant.

So I broke these down some more:

1. When I wake up, I am NOT going to my nest. I am setting a timer for 30 minutes and walking on the treadmill. I watch HGTV and at 2.5 MPH I am doing a mile in the time it takes for Erin and Ben Napier to reno a house.
2. Then, all proud of myself, I make coffee and settle in for a biscotti and my word games. I get to play until 10 a.m. when I have to get up and get on with the day.
3. On the weekdays, I go to the computer and work for several hours on my graphic, video or website jobs.
4. On the weekends, I go to the computer and work on personal projects, including writing a new book, Windshadow. It’s the Irish one you all voted on way back when. My goal is to have it finished by the end of summer. Working every weekend (and some evenings) is the plan to eat this particular pachyderm.
5. I stop cold at 5 p.m. and enjoy a personal Happy Hour (with or without wine.)
6. Dinner is my worst thing and I am trying to do better about eating something healthy and not just popcorn or cheese and crackers (a frequent extension of Happy Hour.)
7. I no longer allow myself to snack after dinner (my second worst thing,) and I turn out all the lights, signaling the kitchen is closed.
8. I had an electrician come out last week and fix all my electrical issues and hang a new chandelier.
9. I went to the nursery, bought new plants, planted most of them, got rained out. But they have to be done by Easter, when I have a houseful of people coming to hunt eggs. Actually only two will hunt eggs, the rest will smash eggs on each other’s heads. I blame Tamala for this, too.
10. The website business is the albatross around my neck, but my PLAN is to start June 1 to divest myself of it and be through by Labor Day. The actual munching on individual websites will wait until then.

SO! A PLAN!

And now! To ACTION!

This plan is pretty recent, so I am in the honeymoon phase with it. Eager to get to the treadmill, purchase healthy foods, plant shrubbery. So I’ll check back in a few months and we’ll see how I’m doing. But for now, I have turned the tide of my despair by forging a plan and taking action.

Thanks for letting me share. As always, I’d love to hear about how you reach your GPA or eat an elephant, whichever comes first.