In which I have goals.

[randomling]

I have goals, people.

I posted these on jjhunter's awesome Quarterly Intentions meme and wanted to preserve them here too as I'm going to come back and work on them.

1. Some kind of progress on the novel. I might have to figure out what a useful wordcount goal is.
2. Finish the Intensive Questionnaires for Danny, Tess and Shri, and add Joel's unanswered questions to his.
3. Work my way up from 2 days to 3 days a week at the gym, and from 15-minute walk/run sessions to 20-minute walk/run sessions on the treadmill, with a view to starting Couch to 5k in March or April.
4. Apply for Enough Jobs (figure out how much that should actually be, self!), get invited to/attend at least 6 interviews, OR land a job.
5. Work out a useful HBA1C goal for April-ish with my diabetes nurse and try to achieve that with the new meds + diet and exercise.

So how does this fit into my overarching goals?


So the first two are writing goals - specifically, I want to get a draft of the novel finished some time in the next 6 months, and I'd like to do these character questionnaires in preparation for Draft 2 (in which Shri and Tess are going to get bigger roles, because female characters).

3 and 5 are health-related goals - one that's specifically about measuring how I'm doing with the diabetes, and one that's about exercise for its own sake.

4 is job-related.

So how do these goals plug into resilience?

The writing goals don't really, or at least they don't seem to me to - except, EXCEPT. This novel has been on my plate for a long time and I keep despairing of getting a draft finished, never mind get it into reasonable shape for sharing with people. It would be an amazing achievement to actually finish a draft. One that takes resilience in the form of perseverance-in-the-face-of-hardship. And so I count it towards my Mental Resilience goal.

So on my five prongs:

Mental resilience: Finish the novel! In fact completing other goals (like job applications) also works towards this. I'd also like to resume working on my knowledge - so programming for DW and Growstuff again and learning more maths and programming stuff.
Emotional resilience: Improving my support systems and working on soothing some of the guilt I have about using the ones I've got. Learning more about self-care and relaxation and generally reducing my emotional load and my tendency towards epic overwhelm. It feels a bit like there are no concrete goals here, but I feel like I might be able to create some out of this idea.
Physical resilience: Getting more exercise! Looking after the diabetes better! Making some incremental improvements to my diet! These sound like good goals.
Social resilience: Seeing people! Meeting new people! Improving my relationships!
Financial resilience: Getting on appropriate benefits and acquiring a job! Maybe seeing if there are Things I Can Sell to improve my short-term cashflow!

...okay.

So we have like, 15 overall goals and I can probably stand to try one thing on each overall goal. (This is not actually taking account of my very long-term projects like Project Space, which will probably need to get its own thing, or the more short-term project of how best to deploy what little spare money I have, which also needs to get its own thing. Never mind Project Just Get Out Of The Fucking House, because spending all day and all night staring at a computer screen is doing me no favours.)

Sooooo. Okay this is a good starting point, I'm starting to be a bit Anxious about all of this, so I'm going to stop here for now.