When to Let Go of a Goal

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I’m so mad because I was doing so well reading goals wise! I was like this I I close to meeting my page number goal by the end of the year and then Christmas Eve, Christmas, and family stuff happened and now in order to make my reading goal I’d have to read close to 400 pages a day for the next three and a half days in order to make it. Granted I do have three half finished books that if I finished them would give me a big ol’ chunk of pages, but I’m not sure that will be enough because I’m doing a weekend with some friends for New Year’s and I seriously doubt I’ll spend much time reading. Certainly I’ll listen to books on the way to meet up with everybody tomorrow but I doubt that is going to be enough. I guess we’ll just have to see. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have so much to do tonight too, but I’m slammed. And I’m still trying to find a way to meeting my writing goal for the last month of this year, but it looks like I’ll probably be about 3000 words short for that too. I’d like to harrumph about that. I guess I should give myself a little bit of a break. The last half of December is freaking crazy, but at the same time, the beginning of December wasn’t that busy and I probably could’ve done a little more to get ahead of my goals. I don’t know. I did have a pretty solid plan and I did try to get ahead on the reading at least. 

I think I also need to be fair to myself about the fact that my original goal was 50,000. I made that. My next stretch goal was 55,000 and I’ve made that too. Now I’m less than 1,400 pages shy of 60,000. That’s a pretty good deal. Today is the actual last day of the year from when I started. I’ve mentioned it before, but I have traditionally finished my goals on December 28th and started the goals for the next year on the 29th. Maybe I need to make peace with my 58,612 pages (plus anything I finish tonight while I’m waiting for my oil change or whatever) and congratulate myself on a job well done. I read 323 books, graphic novels, and comics this year which is a pretty good number too. I don’t know. I need to re-evaluate next year’s goal too. As much as I want to read like crazy, I think maybe I’m pushing too hard. I can’t be enjoying my books as much if I’m always pushing to get to the next one, right?

I think it might be time to say “enough” and start shifting towards next year’s goals.