2023 started out well; I had goals that were moving in the right direction and felt good about things. But then halfway through the year, I heaped an additional goal onto the heap that completely upset the apple cart and forced everything else to a halt.
I made the decision to further my engineering career by getting my PMP certification. It is a professional project management certification that requires extensive study culminating in a three-hour exam. I poured myself into the task and expected to have it complete before Thanksgiving.
Well, that didn’t happen. It’s mid-January of 2024 and I’ve only now scheduled my test. It wasn’t that I didn’t study or gave up or anything like that. It was that life events and the ephemeral reality of time placed metaphorical chutes and ladders in my path. (two-week vacation, tiling my basement, large projects at work, etc.)
However, now that I have the test scheduled and the end of this particular task in sight, I can resurrect the goals I’d set aside, such as organizing my vacation pictures, the rewrite of my book, and this blog.
However, I’ve found that restarting a project or goal is much like getting back on a horse. It’s as if both you and the goal are reluctant to start. I’ve yearned to work on these things for months but held my back because I knew I couldn’t give them the time they deserved. So, now I find that I am still a little shy of jumping into the task too hard, afraid that I will be pulled away again, unable to give it the attention I want. I feel the projects shying away from me for the same reasons. I’ve avoided and ignored them for so long that they’ve gone feral.
It will take some time to get my goals tamed and myself refocused. But the last six months of concentrated single-minded focus on a task have taught me some valuable skills. I tended to spread myself too thinly across too many projects. I now realize that I need to concentrate on the single task at hand.
Today it’s this post.
So, here’s to getting things rolling again in 2024. I have a lot to accomplish.
So Many Words... 