I would say my success rate of saying no to accomplishing goals is around 45%. The reason for this numerical value is that I have been tracking my writing routines consistently.   

I cannot say I have been consistent with the goal itself, writing.

My writing is one of those goals that has been around for a long time, however not with consistency, not like other professional and financial constraint goals. There are many to choose from: project completion for clients, grade submissions by school deadlines, or even Amazon order return dates.

The goals like those above have strict deadlines, and without keeping them, there would be negative consequences. With these external/financial consequence-driven goals, I have a very good success rate…dare say, 100% of the time!

On the other hand, the success rate disintegrates in the face of my personal goals. The kinds that do not have hard deadlines, or even accountability attached to them…the kind, that no one knows whether I am even working on them or not.  

My writing work is one of those personal goals I made years ago; write and publish 2 blog posts every Tuesday / Thursday. Recognizing the importance of writing, I made the decision to work on this personal goal with very inconsistent schedules.

I wrote several blog posts on challenges of keeping up with writing routines.

Even though the goal seemed pretty simple and straightforward, I did not anticipate the difficulty of “keeping” with the goal- writing schedules. There were many reasons for missing the writing goals, some were legitimate (emergency hospital visits recently) and many were not. 

The biggest obstacle to keeping my writing goals was me.

More specially, my thoughts and emotions got in the way of writing. There were many and varied feelings in front of writing tasks:

• don’t feel like writing right now…maybe later which becomes never
• nothing to write about
• let’s research some more 
• let’s organize my desk first before the writing
• great weather (to go out first and come back to write)
• bad weather(wait for sun to shine so that I have positive mindset to write)
• endless more…but don’t feel like writing them:)

Of course not following my schedules mean missing publish deadlines, and the tendency to push to the following week continues into a vicious cycle of “another” the following week.  

As I am pondering on my failing grade on writing, I know the significance of accomplishing personal goals in the overall grand scheme of my life. In fact, the personal kinds might be even more significant than the external, someone else’s hard-set deadline goals.   

In this depressing thought, I also have a miniscule-sized positive realization forming about this failing grade.

My earlier grades I started the blog years ago- started with around 10% which means that I am improving, even if failing.

Eventually, I might just get to the state where the no becomes an automatic response to all potential writing obstacles, even in the good or bad weather conditions:-)