Points Project (round two).

Apparently a few people liked this idea of the Points Project.  I'd love to hear about your system in the comments.  Does it work for you? 

The Points Project.

For a few months now, I've been engaged in something I call the Points Project.  It started as a way for me to keep myself accountable to actually doing something with my days in the summer, but it's morphed into a general metric of becoming, I guess.

Here's how it works.  I made a little spreadsheet in Google Docs.  It looks something like this:

I figured out the goals of my life.  Not in the sense of what I want to accomplish as much as who I want to be.  There's a place for emotional development, spiritual development, physical development, whatever.  Then, I made up some activities and disciplines that need to be present in my life in order to grow in that area.  Each one gets a point score, depending on how difficult it is or how tricky it is to motivate me to do that item.

The system is not perfect.  I've tweaked it a number of times to try to be more accurate or more motivating.   I've added quite a few activities that are worthy of my time and interest so that, hopefully, my points help me track my growth as a person.

The trouble I've had lately is that I've not had a reason to get more points.  I'm far too sensible for it to be some kind of monetary goal.  I've got enough of those as it is without figuring out some kind of payout for points.  My new strategy is to post my scores online.  Hopefully, that will motivate me to keep getting my scores back into the 200 or 300 range, rather than the abysmal 100ish I've been getting lately...

So join me as I spam my blog and twitter feed with a contest that I'm playing with myself.

On goals.

Every time I look forward to a new phase of life, I tend to write back here on the good ol' blog.

(Side note: it drives me crazy when people put the apostrophe on the wrong side of the contraction. Like 'ol. I've seen it.)

Today was my last day of work until January 11, when I will triumphantly stride back into a newly reorganized CAMS to greet the J-term-ers. So that leaves me with almost a month of free time to manage.

I've been looking ahead to this time, thinking about what I want to do with it and I needed to write it out (so why not publicly? This is the digital age, after all...).

Goals for Winter Break 09-10
1. Read the Qu'ran. I need to expand my mind like my public school friends had to do.
2. Finish applying to Grad schools. Which leads into the next goals...
3. Make a game. A short game, naturally, but something to add to the ol' portfolio. I may actually run some beta versions of the games I have on paper, too.
4. Write. Every day. Again. Some more. Blog, journal entry, poem, script, ideas, short story, anything.
5. Ideate. I need to keep stoking the fire of my imagination again. I want to lead and cast vision (How did that metaphor even start? Casting vision? Flicking the fishing rod of our eyes into the stream of the future? I dunno...)
6. Read a fiction book that isn't part of some canon of things I'm "supposed" to read. I can't even remember the last fiction book I read, let alone the last fiction book that I wasn't forcing myself through...
7. Keep thinking about things. All kinds of things: God, leadership, life, writing. Anything but getting stuck in ruts of thoughts.
8. Love people.
9. Have fun. All this goal setting scares me and exhausts me before the break has even started... Sheesh. I just bought Rock Band 2 and I need to finish The World Ends With You. Lots of fun to be had.


Anyway. That's my list. It's longer than I expected, but that's what I get for wanting to be better at a lot of things...

New disciplines.

As is my custom for school breaks, I have made a small list of things I want to accomplish with my break. There are books I want to read, relationships I want to cultivate, games I want to play, etc...

This break, I have decided to write 500 words a day, 6 days a week. It can be anything: a blog post (heh heh...), a journal entry, a screenplay, a radio drama, a poem (I count poems as the full 500, though. They're hard.), etc... The point is to make a habit out of writing.

It has been about as hard as I expected. Naturally, I have only written maybe 1000 words so far. The other night, I actually let myself get by with the excuse that I didn't have anything to write, that I was dry.

That's sort of the point of a discipline, isn't it? That you do it even when you don't want to or feel like you can't?

I hope it doesn't degrade to me updating this blog over and over again in a desperate attempt to boost my word count.