Given that it’s September you might expect our thoughts to be full of the ‘back-to-school’ feeling that new pencil cases induce. But actually, we’re looking a bit further ahead. We’re thinking about doing a year review and 2022.
Firstly, now is the ideal time to do a planner review. You need to look at your current system and figure out which bits are useful to you and which bits you have stopped using. And you need to do this before deciding which planner to invest your time and money in for 2022.
And then you can focus on enjoying autumn and starting to evaluate the year. Why now? Partly because doing a review in late December doesn’t give you enough time to think. But also because we bet you’ve got goal fatigue. This is surely a thing.
Goal Fatigue
It goes like this: you set yourself goals in January and do well. In February, you drop off a bit but get back on it in March. Then the weather gets warmer and there is just so much stuff going on. As a result, consistency goes out of the window.
Plus you’re bored of the plans you made in January. By this time of year, you’re all out of ways to make your goals work. You’ve done the stuff that you’re really keen to do, weeded out the stuff that you no longer want or choose to do and what do you have left? The difficult or tedious stuff.
One outcome of this fatigue is a tendency to set vague goals. We do it when we’re hoping that if we throw all kinds of things at it, something will stick and then we can just cross it off the list before the end of the year. But you can’t have a vague theme every month and expect to stick to it. It seems easy to settle for ‘Eat well September’ (because August was full of ice cream and chips). But it actually requires more effort because you have to make loads more decisions.
You’ve got to figure out moment by moment what you mean when your goals aren’t clear. It’s much less effort to come up with fruit-for-dessert September, salad-a-day September or eat-breakfast September. The action is clear so you know what you have to do.
If that really seems too much effort then maybe take a bit of a break from everything. You officially have goal fatigue. Step back and make plans for 2022.