I'll Do It On Monday!

Never achieve your goals, the art of not living up to what you set out to do.

Goals are things we want to accomplish. They’re the results of things we want to happen in the future, in our professional and our personal lives. Sometimes it’s something like making more money, or losing weight. Goals usually have to be in some definite terms though and need to be written down. For instance making 50k dollars at the end of the year.

Here at ‘Monday’ goal setting can be either good or bad. It can be a good source of busy work. If you’re so busy setting and reading your goals every day you’re not spending time getting them accomplished. However once you’ve written them down you have a better idea of what you want to accomplish, which could be dangerous. So today I’m going to attempt to extol the virtues of not accomplishing those goals.

Okay so essentially you want to do and accomplish nothing, but you’ve written down these goals now but you want to avoid doing them. The easy solution is to basically not do them, however, you can actually work on your goals without working on your goals. For instance, one of the things you might do to accomplish them is by reading them every day, sort of like affirmations. However if your goal document is large enough you could waste a lot of time reading them every day. Especially if you’re not a speed reader.

Maybe you should de-motivate yourself. In fact I have an article on just such a thing. Motivation is the get-up-and-go of your goals. You don’t want to be motivated; you would rather the goals just sit there. So you could sleep in. Don’t do a lot of moving, watch TV and the myriad of other things to keep you unmotivated.

Don’t have any strong commitments to the goals. If you’re committed it means you’re going to get them done no matter what. Well the object here is of course not getting them done. Hopefully your goals are vague enough that commitment is not required. Don’t say no a lot either. Saying yes to other things means you won’t be able to accomplish your own goals because you won’t have a lot of time to commit to it. So even if you’re caught in the trap of having strong commitments to your goals you can at least have other things occupy your time so you don’t actually accomplish anything.

Don’t get anyone involved which might help you accomplish your goals. If you announce you’re doing said goals, people might hold you to it. So you want to make sure you’re not telling anyone, especially friends and family. Just don’t show anyone. Just pretend you’re as lazy as you ever were. Because you are and you want it to stay that way.

Never break down your goals like with de-motivation and procrastination, the bigger they are the less you’ll be tempted to complete them. Make sure the goals are huge and complex and contain many moving parts. Well you know what I mean. Like a complex machine, if your goals are too complex you might be tempted to not do them, which is what we want.

Someone once said being afraid is just another way of blocking you from achieving your goals. I couldn’t agree more. You should probably read my article on being afraid. You want to be afraid of both success and failure at the same time. So then you don’t even try. You know that pretty girl you always wanted to ask out. She’ll never even speak to you, so why try? You know you’re smart and you see the honor roll. You know you’ll be on it if you do your best work, so why not do lousy work, because they always ask honor roll students to give speeches and you don’t want that kind of stress.

Don’t start. Because often starting is the hardest part. You don’t want to start on any of your goals because once you do, like the 20 dollar bill you broke and is now dwindling away to nothing, your goals will start being accomplished dwindling them away to nothing. And by that I mean you’ll start accomplishing your goals. Remember 80% of success is just showing up, so take heed and not show up.

There are a few more things here I want to address before wrapping it up. A friend wrote an article on three ways to achieve your goals more easily. The nice thing is, we here at ‘Monday’ can do the opposite and so can you! His first way is focus on a few goals and not a billion. So here at ‘Monday’ we say, have billions of goals. Too many goals will keep you from accomplishing a few possibly important goals. His second way is making the goals vivid. His assertion is that you need to make the wording more exciting using words like vibrant and sexy. So my advice is to make sure the goals are as boring and unspecific as possible. I want to lose weight or make more money is all we need here at ‘Monday’. His third way is keep your attentions on those goals. His thoughts are that you need to think about your goals constantly. Rather than writing them down a lot, maybe you only write them down once but every morning re-read them. However here at ‘Monday’ we say write them once and then never look at them again. We don’t want you accomplishing your goals.

So to summarize: Make sure there’s a lot of goals or a lot of documentation on those goals. De-motivate yourself through various means such as TV and sleeping. Don’t commit and don’t get anyone else involved. Don’t break down your goals and basically don’t start. If you follow this advice you’ll be on your way to not accomplishing anything in no time!

Until ‘Monday’

We’ve all read them. They’re squished into every corner of the internet; a vast wealth of opinion, hearsay, and ‘bro-science’; Rants and raves, top ten lists, and tip repositories on every subject in the alphabet from A to Z. What am I talking about? That’s right web logs or “blogs” as the ‘intern3tz’ calls them. They waste peoples time to read and, more often as not, to write. That’s what we love about them here on ‘Monday’. Anything that can help you lead wasteful unproductive lives is what we love here. They tend to mask themselves as digital journalism, but don’t let that fool you. They’re around for one purpose and one purpose only: to make money. The only way they do that is if you waste your time to make them money. Here at ‘Monday’ we applaud activities such as this.

There are some people out there that really do state the truth and really do report the news on their blogs, but we don’t care about them. News and truth aren’t really virtues here on ‘Monday’. Not to say we don’t care about truth here, however, finding the truth entails real work, and journalistic integrity which we don’t have here at ‘Monday’. What I will show you here are ways in which you can waste your time writing blog posts to help others waste their time reading. We won’t go into setting up a blog, as that takes too much work and really I would rather be doing something else. You can probably find out how to start a blog by doing a search. (In fact searches will be explored in future articles as a fun way to waste time.)

First you need a topic. Pick a topic, any topic, or better yet, make up a topic. Part of the fun of blog posts, especially those designed to waste time, is being able to make stuff up. You could talk about the underground flora and fauna of Mars and you would be totally legitimate. We don’t know what’s underneath Mars surface (and what with NASA disbanded, we may never know thereby letting us say whatever the heck we want). We could write stories, that since we can’t get published because we’re not any good, we can self publish via a web log. Whatever topic you pick, make sure it’s not of use to anyone anywhere, or they may become productive with it, or at the very least, learn something, and that would never do.

Now that we have our topic, let’s start writing. I advocate two approaches but one must take care that one isn’t being productive about it, they each have their risks. The first one is just writing first and revising later. The risk as that you’ll actually revise it later. You don’t want to revise later because that is productive. Instead you want to just write without any facts or background to back it up. Of course you can also start searching for some background on what you just write to fix it later, but remember just that, later, you don’t want to fix it right away. You want to spend the time searching and then get sidetracked on the latest fashion or movie box office receipts.

The other approach is to make sure everything is perfect from the get go. Perfectionism is a GREAT way to waste time and be unproductive. In this case you might want to waste your time searching and getting sidetracked. Google several pages, open them in tabs, read them until it’s time to go to bed and maybe follow a tangent or two off of Wikipedia. Then when the next day rolls around you can try to be perfect and put every little thing you searched for in your post. Be sure to use long and drawn out explanations, so that we don’t have to do any real work either, just read your post until we realized it’s past dinner time. Make sure your grammar and spelling are exact, make sure it’s says everything you want to say and in exactly the way you want to say it.

Before you know it, your parents have grounded you, your spouse has put you on the couch for the night, and your boss will fire you. Follow this article and before you know it, you won’t have produced anything meaningful.

Until ‘Monday’