Big Goals and Balance
Every summer when I start to go biking there is a similar pattern. Usually a short ride at the beginning and then some big rides of 50 km or more. It’s a good way to get going and get motivated. The goal for the past few years has been to bike over 1000 km during the summer and it has been relatively easy with big rides.
The challenge is to keep going after the finish line is crossed. So while there are a bunch of very big rides at the beginning, for some reason the need to keep going stops after the goal is reached. Maybe that means explicitly setting a bigger goal to keep going toward that. Or maybe I need to watch fewer films.
While I don’t participate in sports or play a lot of games, I’ve come to realize that there is quite a competitive streak in me. It’s good to set goals and meet them as it pushes you to do more. With the ability to track things semi-automatically it makes goals like walking or biking a lot easier. Just by checking every now and then to see how you are doing can give you a little push to keep going.
Tracking what you do can build up the habits of doing something. Having streaks is a good thing as you don’t want to break it. After tracking the films watched in a year, the goal of watching an average of a film a day became part of my routine. Then you want to do a bit better every year, so while the main goal is a film a day, looking at last year on Letterboxd I see that if I just watched 9 more films I would have hit 400. So as I write this, I’m at 335 films for 2014, which is 569.7 hours of film watching. It seems like a lot (it actually is a lot), but without watching a lot of tv, it may be close to what other people watch.
The down side of the big film watching goal is that it probably isn’t helping with other goals like exercising and biking. A film usually takes 90 minutes to 2 hours, so that is the length of a bike ride or half of a bigger one. So maybe I need to let some of the film watching goals go to balance it all out.
One idea for the winter months when biking isn’t really an option is to exercise and watch films. So maybe hopping on the elliptical to watch something, or getting a bike trainer to allow for indoor cycling could do the trick to combine two goals. That could be the key to getting more done.
