Developing long term goals
If
you're a type A person overwhelmed by the nitty-gritty of realizing
your dreams, one
solution is to draw up a realistic timeline. I
found it very useful to sit down with Mark and write out a list of big
projects we want to accomplish on the farm. These tend to be the
expensive and/or time-consuming goals that make me twitch when I gaze
out over our homestead and realize we haven't even begun to work on
them, things like growing our own meat or becoming more energy
independent.
If you're playing along
at home, this is your chance to get everything
that keeps you up at night off your chest and onto paper, so write
every little thing
down. The image to the right is this year's incarnation of our
big picture goals. I broke our farm goals down into four
categories, mostly to make myself pay attention to things other than
the garden (which I've channeled most of our energy toward over the
last four
years.)
After listing everything
we ache to achieve, Mark and I each rated the
importance of the goals within each category. So, for example,
Mark and I both felt that dealing with our creek crossing was the most
important goal in the Other category, but Mark wanted to improve the
driveway next while I wanted to finish burying our water line so that
it wouldn't freeze in the winter. I averaged our two ratings for
each goal to give us a list of priorities within each category.
For the record, here are our prioritized long term goals in each
category:
Buildings:
- Biochar toilet
- Finish the storage building
- Bathing room
- Fix fridge root cellar
- Build another woodshed
- Insulate the trailer floor
- Build a second fridge root cellar
- Porch on the north side of trailer with summer kitchen
- Barn roof repair
- Porch on south side of trailer with steps
- Hobbit caves (underground sleeping area)
Garden:
- Find a way to keep constant mulch cover
- Be able to reproduce mushrooms
- Grains
- Oil
Livestock:
- Start fencing/hedging pastures
- Figure out chicken reproduction
- Plant forest pasture trees
- Consider sheep, pig, goats, meat chickens
Other:
- Creek crossing
- Finish burying water line
- Wood chipper
- Find a temporary caretaker to mind the farm when we take trips
- Deal with mud around the house
- Solidify the driveway with more rocks
- Off grid lights and stove fan
- More efficient wood stove
- Solar hot water heater
- Powered parachute
- Perimeter trail
We repeat this exercise
once a year in January, so this list is
slightly out of date. Tomorrow, I'll tell you how this list makes
life less overwhelming,
rather than more so.
| This post is part of our Coping With Paradise lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Relax!
The disadvantage of task lists is that you'll never run out of tasks.
When you kick the bucket there will probably still be a full task list.
Ask yourself how big a problem it would be if a certain project doesn't get done? The first tool of time management is to not do certain tasks or to postpone them. The goal is to make your task list manageable so you can actually get some things done. This will give you energy instead of being an energy drain. The second thing is that priorities are not static but will always be in flow. Accept that. Do not worry about external circumstances that you cannot change.
For bigger tasks it always helps me to make a rough planning of a task. How much time do you think it requires? What materials do you need and when can you have them available? What would be the most suitable time? Can you divide it up into smaller tasks that are easier to schedule and complete?
And think about how you can combine things in a smart way. E.g. if you hire a compact excavator you could maybe bury the waterline, dig the root cellars and your toilet in one go.
Well, see, it tied for fourth place, and I made the official final list...
On the other hand, you'll notice that even though it didn't make it onto the year's long term goals (more on them tomorrow), Mark still snuck it onto our weekly lists and it got done this year anyhow.
(Plus, if you look closely, you'll see that Mark cheated and gave two things a ranking of two in the "other" category! Tch, tch!)