In this article I reflect on my own failure to achieve big goals, the reasons why, the lessons learned and the steps I'm taking to be more accountable and productive towards my goals.

Unbounded enthusiasm in endless areas.

From childhood through my adult life, I seem to have a new passion every few months. I'm always excited about something new. Creating art, writing code and playing music are some of the only things I've taken a long term interest in. Each of these scratch that constant itch to keep learning. As a coder, theres always a new language, topic or framework to explore. As an artist, there are endless styles and techniques to discover. Music is the language of the soul - there are neverending discoveries to be made in different instruments and musical styles.

This is an aspect of myself I would never give up. I relish the opportunity to learn a new skill and explore it deeply. It may not be a very practical or profitable way to live but it is what makes me happy in life. I hope that I am still approaching life as an amateur in my old age.

That said, I am sure that with a few strategies I'll mention in this article, I can waste less time toward goals and save myself some frustration in the process.

Beware ambition without accountability

As soon as I start learning something new, be it a programming language, musical instrument, or artistic technique, the immense possibilities become clear. My excitement gets the best of me and I start thinking of goals far beyond my ability. Dunning-Krueger Effect sets in, I see all the possibilities from my foothold at the peak of Mount Stupid, and I start setting goals way outside my current competence level.

Now lets be very clear, I'm not a time management expert or self-actualization guru. I'm just a nearly 40 year old ADHD kid who has fallen short of countless goals and found a few ways to change that pattern. Some techniques for focus and time management work better for some people than others. Theres no way to know what is best for you aside from trying things and really paying attention to your body and mind.

However there are some clear steps you can take to reign in ambitious goals and keep yourself accountable.

1. Dont work on projects, work on tasks. Any task that requires more than one action is a project. Break projects into actionable tasks and track them.

2. Maintain your task list. Capture everything. If its a project, figure out the next actionable tasks. If you can get it done in under two minutes, do it immediately. If a task on your list is not actionable and you dont need it, delete it. Review your tasklist and organize it every day.

   These first two tips are straight from GTD, or Getting Things Done from David Allen. Its a life-changing book that I recommend to anyone.

3. Work in bursts of productivity. Use the Pomodoro Technique. This means when you work on a task, set a 25-min timer and focus exclusively on that task. If something distracts you and its important, write it down, but then immediately get back to your focused work. After the timer ends, take a short break of 5 minutes. Then get back to work. After about 4 of these "pomodoros," take a longer break. Using the pomodoro technique is great to increase your ability to focus on one thing at a time, and ensure that distractions do not happen during designated focus time.

Recognize and manage your distractions

As an ADHD person, my emotions can quickly get the best of me if the uncertainty of a task is overwhelming. I have found myself popping open a social media tab, picking up my phone, or starting a game of Rocket League to soothe the mental pain far too often in life.

But I have so many hours in the day, and those distractions must go in order to enact change. Beginning a journey towards a massive goal is challenging enough without the common distractions. Unconstrained social media time really cuts into daily spoon count. For many people, it feels to be a necessity to promote your work or build a network. But its clear that the biz-req of maintaining social-media engagement can quickly balloon into a never-ending habit of the dopamine loop.

Using the previous tips of breaking up tasks and working toward them with the Pomodoro technique has been a very productive strategy.

Failures are steps towards success.

Distractions are not the only road-blocks towards progress. Not every task can be seen through to completion. Not every task will be done at any time. Its important to recognize where you excel and where you fall short or could improve. When I've been unable to complete a task and burned way too many hours on it, that task becomes a roadblock for everything else in your list. One small item is usually not worth derailing your entire task-list. Its important to identify when a task is taking up too much time, and make a decision about it.

Managing my tasks instead of letting the manage me.

Personally, I can't just work on day in and day out on a coding project and expect to be effective with my time and effort - God knows I've tried. But by failing at that, I've learned something important - I can write code most effectively in the morning, and after more than four consecutive hours, my effectiveness declines rapidly. The failure to work non-stop has led to an important discovery and a change in my routine. I now designate 9am-1pm as coding time, and those hours are the most focused and productive for that work.

For me, coding in isolation for any longer than 4 straight hours leads to mental burnout. I need to interact with people or I start feeling like I'm going crazy. ADHD takes hold and I start getting upset with myself. So I've learned to recognize that and schedule my afternoon to compliment my natural inclinations.

After around 1pm I switch from solo-work to more human or interpersonal tasks like pair-programming, task planning, sending emails or making calls. Without that break from code, I become much more burnt out by the end of my day.

Of course, not everyone is like me - some people code best late at night with a glass of whiskey, other people can earnestly code all day long and still thrive mentally. I need people time, and scheduling my day accordingly has made a huge difference in my stress levels, effectiveness, and overall attitude by the end of the day.

Big goals need small milestones and tiny tasks.

My tendency to set big-goals has kept me motivated, but it has come at a price. My fear of failure has caused me to undergo needless stress in order to meet my naive big goal I originally set. By setting ambitious goals, I find that I stretch myself thin quite quickly. So much to learn, tasks in the backlog, unseen hurdles to overcome.

For example I am currently building an art curation app that I will write more on in a future blog post. I initially planned to build a gallery curation tool, social media comment-aggregation, a bot that you could interact with in order to post content to the website, integration with a bunch of different marketplace smart-contracts, and not to mention I needed to design this whole thing. I quickly realized that despite my fairly extensive experience as a web3 developer, this was a huge task-list for one person and I lacked a lot of the knowledge and experience necessary to get big parts of it done rapidly.

I've repeated this cycle many times in my life. Make a huge goal, realize its too big, struggle to achieve it by myself, eventually run out of time or give up. I would beat myself up over my inadequacy. Despite my deep knowledge in many areas, others would become roadblocks and there are only so many hours in the day.

The Cult of Done, where failure and mistakes count.

Then I discovered The Cult of Done. It showed me that I was needlessly struggling. Goals are helpful but they are not so important that you must keep on every one of them until completion. Sometimes learning something is much harder to accomplish than you expected is a valid outcome. Letting go is not just okay, it lifts the roadblock and allows you to continue being productive.

The manifesto might seem a little cryptic sounding and might take a while to sink in. Since time is valuable and not everything needs to be a mystery, you should watch this video - I promise it'll make a lot more sense.

Challenging myself daily

Better task management has been only part of the solution. Committing to daily practice in an area I need to grow in has made a huge difference to how deeply and rapidly I learn that topic.

A couple years ago I did a challenge I called #100DaysOfBlender and completed it successfully. I learned an incredible amount, including how to manage my time on that task - its easy to aimlessly create for hours! By the end of those ~3 months, I was fluent in the software and while not yet an expert in 3D, was surprisingly well on the way towards that goal.

Making a public commitment to complete the goal and posting my daily renders helped keep me accountable. I was driven to create daily, not just by the fear of not just letting myself down, but also all the people who were rooting me on and inspired by the task. By working in public, I was rewarded with an audience following me for my work in the area I wanted to grow in.

My next challenges...

ADHD strikes again! I have so many areas I would love to do daily challenges for. Skills I want to grow a depth of knowledge in. Prioritizing these has been so hard, that I've ended up choosing none of them for quite a while now.

My first step is the one you're looking at right here. Writing. November is National Novel Writer's Month and that would be a very ambitious goal - write 50k words in a month. Thats a little over 1600 words a day. I dont know if a novel is for me, but I'm getting in the habit of writing my thoughts daily in anticipation. It doesnt matter to me if I do NaNoWriMo, what matters is that I start writing daily. The thought of being ready to do it is merely the impetus to get me going.

By writing every day I can start working in public on those other goals. I dont need to do only one challenge at a time - writing can go well alongside any of these other goals. A more practical solution might be scheduling my week to touch each of these things, and write about my progress each day.

Building the future, in public

I would like to begin working in public towards my goals. I now know that this transparency has many benefits. By writing about my progress, I learn more from my efforts. By sharing my work, I can build a reputation from it. By being radically transparent about success as well as failure, I can help others learn from my mistakes and share a piece of my humanity in the process.

This article is my commitment to building and learning in public. I hope that my successes and failures alike will resonate with someone. If you would like to follow along, please subscribe to this blog. If you are personally inspired by anything in this article, whether its my lessons learned, some tips about time management, or challenging yourself, please share your thoughts on Farcaster!

I hope to share my explorations soon. Until next time! 🫡