goals and freedom

Without being too rigid about it, I've decided to start being a little more goal-oriented.  Although I am apparently quite capable of putting my life on hold for who knows how long (5 years comes to mind) I am probably much more the kind of person who finds freedom in structure and setting some smaller goals and seeing them through to completion will hopefully be a great way to free myself from the dreaded "ought" disease and its accompanying guilt.  Of course all of the goals I'm setting involve things I ought to do so I guess there's no escaping it.

So to kick it off, I decided that this would be the summer that I help the 2500 liriope plants that I planted in 2007 to finally beat the weeds.  In order for this to happen, I need to beat the weeds myself and then put down mulch and hopefully the liriope will take it from there.  I think I have about five more days of pulling weeds ahead of me in order to accomplish this goal.  The only real problem is that it KILLS my hands and I need to take days off here and there just to let them recover.  But I don't want to take any days off - I just want to get it done as soon as possible.  So that I can be free of needing to do it anymore.  But it's hard to stop.  I'm somewhat obsessed with getting it done right now.

To help myself get into the right frame of mind to want engage in such a miserable task, I thought it might be useful to launch a parallel activity that I would be able to do every day no matter how exhausted I was physically.  So I made another goal to do a blog post either here or on my house blog every single day this month.  I've discovered that it is quite difficult to come up anything intelligent to say when I'm in a state of total physical exhaustion.  But so far I've managed to do one post each day and I only have a week to go!  And then I'll be free of the obligation I made to myself.  And the people who visit my blog will be free of the random crap I've been posting recently.

Another goal that is not moving along as well because I haven't given it any definite parameters yet is the slipcover for the couch.  If I'd had a goal of working on it for one hour each day it would be finished already.  But that hasn't happened because I'm either too exhausted from pulling weeds or I have a blog post to write.  If I don't get it finished by the end of the month, I'm going to set a goal of sewing for one hour each day and I'm going to include all of the curtains in that goal as well.  They are all cut and ready to go and it shouldn't take any time at all once I get started.  And then the people who visit my house will be free of having to looking at my construction paper "curtains" and so will I.

So back to the weeding - here's what I've accomplished so far:

And here's what I still have left - it's a pretty long stretch, but I think it will go quickly if my hands can take it.