Don’t Let Activity Disguise Itself as Action
By: Julia Amante
Tags: Accomplish Writing Goals, Writer Goals, Goal Setting, Achieving Goals, Writing Success

Don’t Let Activity Disguise Itself as Action

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

We are almost, just days away from the end of the year! If you are like me, you are planning for 2021 already and thinking of your goals and what you plan to achieve and do.

I try to avoid words like ALL because nothing ever applies to all of us, but I feel certain that I can say that with the random exception, we are all happy to see 2020 end and are looking forward to a better year.

Tomorrow, I plan to look at the great things that happened in 2020, it hasn’t been all bad. But if we could go back to January 2020 and erase this year, I bet we’d all be okay with that.

And yet, we all had plans at the beginning of 2020. We had hopes and dreams. I was going to celebrate my anniversary in Italy last June. I bought an Italian course online and had fun learning words and phrases the first half of the year. I was following a strict diet, so that I could gain it all back and eat all the pasta I wanted once I got to Italy!

I also had work goals when I wasn’t dreaming of Italy. I had a novel to finish. I had a blog to resume (since I stopped blogging years ago), I had a YouTube channel to develop (I’d had it for a while, but never did anything with it), and I had a writing course I wanted to create.

I would say that I accomplished 90% of my work goals. Not because I’m a superstar. In fact, it was the craziness of 2020 that helped me focus on work. I hate negative vibes and that’s all I saw and heard on the news, so I stopped watching. Even TV shows became unbearable because ever other commercial was a lecture on how to stay safe which was a reminder of the state of the world, or a political ad which was even worse.

So, I poured all my energy into work, both my college teaching and my writing business and the result was immense progress.

That’s Great! So What’s the Problem?

Not every area of my life was this successful, however. Part of being locked in my house with nothing but work and a canceled trip to Italy was that I didn’t have an incentive to eat healthy and exercise like I used to. Part of the problem was that I couldn’t. The gyms in California have been closed for months. But the real reason I failed with this goal was that I didn’t take the action I should have taken.

What I did instead was activity. I read a book titled The Four Hour Body. Interesting. I’m sure his suggestions do work too, if I had chosen to follow his plan. I also listen to a few videos on losing weight and eating healthy. I took out my scale and cleaned it and placed in a prominent spot in the restroom (then promptly stacked dirty laundry on top of it).

I did walk the dogs and go for a swim at the local community college that kept the pool open (I didn’t realize this until September). I also made a great chart to plan out my meals for three weeks so that I could rotate meals and not get bored eating the same thing over and over again.

Anyhow, you get the idea. I kept busy. I involved myself in activity.

What I didn’t do was take action. When my husband asked if he should order a pizza, I said, “yes!”. I should have taken the time to make a healthy meal instead. I took the easy way out and blamed my work schedule and teaching late night classes. What I should have done what always works for me and that is to restrict my calories and exercise more.

Sometimes, We Confuse Activity for Action.

Photo by Kae Ng on Unsplash

We think we’re getting things done when we read a book about writing or when we join a writer’s group on Facebook.

And those a great things to do!

All beginning writers should join writer’s groups and should become immersed in the world of writing, and should read books on craft, and should take writing classes, and listen to writing podcasts, all so on. But what can’t happen is doing these things instead of writing.

Writing always has to come first.

You might be thinking that you need to learn more about writing before you write. And I can tell you that that’s not true and in fact, detrimental to your success.

You must write now, even if it’s not good writing. You can read books and attend seminars, etc. in addition to writing, but you can’t do those things instead of writing. I encourage writers to constantly improve their skills, but that’s only to make the next thing they write be better than the last.

If you allow activity to take the place of action, what will happen will be that activity will become the excuse on why you never have time to write.

When I was reading the book on having a great body, guess what was happening? I was not creating a great body. I was sitting on my couch. I would have been better off taking action and exercising than reading another book on diet and exercise.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Create Your Goals and Take Action

As we move into 2021, commit to take action on your writing goals.

This doesn’t mean you have to block out hours of writing time if you don’t have that time available. But if you outline and plan your story this year, then write one page a day next year, by the end of 2021 you will have a book written!

This requires you to take a little action every day and it keeps you motivated to keep moving forward.

Continue to read books and blogs and listen to podcasts or watch videos. This will help you to keep growing, but don’t let these activities take the place of real writing. Don’t let your brain tell you that you’ve done “something” to advance your writing. If you haven’t written anything that day, then your writing project has not advanced.

It’s a challenge. I’m not saying it’s easy. Believe me, I’ve been creating terrible YouTube videos! I am learning about how to make them better. I’m learning the recording part and the tech part and the design part as I go. Every day, I learn a bit more and I try something different.

Maybe by next year my videos will be better. But if I wait until I learn everything before I start, I will never start. So, I create bad videos (which is okay, since no one watches them right now anyway — an advantage of sorts), and keep learning from those who are better than I am.

This is the way we move forward and succeed at anything, but especially at writing. Take action and write every day.