Break it Down

 I’ve been looking very far ahead in the future lately. What do I want to be doing a year from now? What will have to happen in the next twelve months for me to look back and be happy about the previous twelve months? This time of year, this isn’t an uncommon thing to do. I’ve played this game before and lost miserably. The problem I usually run into is that I have goals, but I get off track. Then I try to get caught up and burn myself out. I really think one of the biggest issues I have is that when I have the original goal, it feels like a big challenging goal. That’s a good thing, right? Most goals really aren’t that big if you break it down to what you need to do on a weekly or daily basis.

 Going From Big to Small

 I heard an author on a podcast talking about how his books are usually between forty thousand and fifty thousand words long. That sounds like a lot, especially when you factor in the fact that when you write a book you have to write double the words you need because an editor is going to come in and cut about half of it. That means that if I wanted to write a book, I would need to find a way to write a hundred thousand words. That sounds impossible in some ways. But what if we break it down to monthly, weekly and daily goals? If you take a hundred thousand and you divide it into twelve, you will have to write 8,333 words in a month. Still sounds like a big number, but we are making progress. If you take one hundred thousand words and divide that by fifty-two weeks, you get 1,923 words. That isn’t an overwhelming number. Now if we take one hundred thousand words and divide that by three hundred and sixty-five, you get 274 words a day. That number is nothing, you can do that in less than ten minutes. I’ve read texts from some people that are longer than that!

 Writing is Easy compared to…

 Not everyone wants to be an author, if I want to be a social media star, videos are going to take a lot more time. That is a very true statement. But the same basic rules apply. Take some time and plan everything out. Do you have editing software? These days you can get some pretty good editing software for either free or fairly cheap.  I’ve always used wondershare for video and audacity for audio. If you want to put a video out every single day on multiple platforms, how do you do it? The first thing I would do is find time every single week to come up with ideas. Find the right place for you that sparks ideas and thinking. I’m guessing that in about an hour you can come up with enough ideas for a week. So, one day a week is just for thinking. Then take a day to go somewhere and record those ideas. Maybe at first, it’s one long video. On day three, use the software to break it down to seven to ten videos. On day four, write out a schedule for what videos you are going to post where. If I only have seven videos, I have a choice, I can post the same video on three platforms, or I can mix it up. If you break it down this way, you still have three or four days a week with nothing scheduled. That means I can take two days a week to record and edit instead of one and still have time.

Getting Healthy

 It has to be mentioned! Every single year people decide to get healthy, and by January 15th the goal has failed. I think the reason this goal fails so often is because we try to lose fifty pounds in a month. Depending on your health situation, you can lose one pound a week and be good. Often to do something like that all you need to do is figure out what your worst habit is and change it. Drink more water, walk more often. You can’t lose fifty pounds in a week, but you can lose one!

 Now What?

 Find a goal, let’s break it down. If you want to read a book a month, read ten pages a day. If you want to save five thousand dollars in a year, save two hundred and eight dollars a paycheck. Everything can be broken down. Let’s do this together, if you have something you can’t figure out how to breakdown, email me at midshiftmentality@gmail.com  we can find a way, and maybe we can turn it into an article to help everyone else out!