It’s January and you’re exhausted and now you have to set goals as well?

The annual goal setting extravaganza is tough for makers. 

It’s hard not to get swept up in the energy of a new year and a new beginning but it’s putting it mildly to say that most of use are not at our best in January.

What if I just want to sleep and eat chocolate?

We’ve all had a long, stressful and emotionally exhausting Christmas selling season. We’ve spent weeks lurching between anxiety about whether the sales would come and then either overwhelmed exhaustion when they do, or crushing disappointment and fear when they don’t.

Plus we’ve probably had more interactions than we would like with the kind of customers we wish would just bother someone else, but we can’t afford to say it.

Then we go straight into a family Christmas that may have been fun, stressful, expensive, tense, or maybe just the final push until you could lie down in a cool, dark room.

But in January the world is ready to get shouty again

Because everyone else had more rest at the end of the year than we did. There were office Christmas parties, and days where nothing much got done, and maybe even two full weeks off work (for my U.S friends, yes this is a real thing in the UK – pretty much all office jobs close down for two weeks)

And when January rolls around, they are ready to get hyped, while we are ready to hibernate.

So you’ll hear a lot of:

“Crush your year”

“Create an in depth roadmap of everything you want to achieve this year”

“Stop playing small and set some big audacious goals”

And you may feel like you’re slacking, or at least wasting an opportunity if you don’t join in.

A different approach for makers

It’s really hard to resist the pull of setting goals in January. And quite honestly, it IS a good time to do it.

But we do need a slightly different approach.

One that recognises that most of us will need to make a slightly slower start, if we want to avoid crashing and burning in the third week of January like a New Year gym goer. 

We might also not make the best choices in January (because exhaustion), so we need a system that can be flexible and let us adapt when we’re feeling a bit more rested.