my best help with achieving goals: a sticker chart. With shiny reward stars.
icon: "progressing (a deeply, vividly green forest of thick vines and trees, with a tunnel running through where unused train tracks lay)"
Something that I have found very VERY helpful in achieving my goals is using a wall calendar and reward stickers. I got the idea from something similar in "Your Life Can Be Better" (a fantastic book of coping mechanisms for ADD people), when the author mentioned that ADD people are especially drawn to color and can be rewarded with it. I was like, I dunno how true that is across the board but for me HELL YES, so how do I reward myself with color? I only came up with one answer but it worked -- I got a wall calendar and star stickers. I didn't keep up with it when I had it by my bed, but when I hung it on the wall right next to my desk I had a lot of success for some months (when I was barely home, it failed). And it kept me thinking about it which is the most important thing for me to achieve goals. Here is the "key" I use from month to month:
[image: a post-it note with star-shaped stickers in two columns, each with words after them.
column 1:
(yellow sparkly star) unprompted openness / time with friends / 2 stars for group time
(purple sparkly star) writing / LJ
(green sparkly star) gardening / exertion / time in nature
(red sparkly star) spiritual practice
(blue sparkly star) take photo / visual art
(pink sparkly star) reading or reviewing
column 2:
(pink white-dotted star) cleaning / organizing / tidying
(green white-dotted star) doing scary or super unpleasant stuff
(blue white-dotted star) caretaking a friend / activist work
(orange white-dotted star) fish care / pet sit care
(orange sparkly star) crafting / mixed media / self-decoration]
Spiritual practice can include meditating, reading a spiritual book, saying a spell, vocal affirmations, deliberately connecting with nature or my body, singing, worshipful movement, dancing, making a sacred object, divination, etc.
The sparkly ones are intended to be daily practices, but I feel satisfied with at least one star every day, and I feel very pleased with myself if I get 4 or more. With 7 daily categories, it is rare that all of them get done in one day! I need to add one more daily category: correct calendar notes. My google calendar is my external memory and when I don't write down what I did or take a photo, I have literally no idea what happened two days ago or sometimes even yesterday.
The dotted stars are not intended to be daily, just regularly enough, I don't have many of them so I am hoping to run them out and replace them with prettier ones because the pink, green, and blue white-dotted stars are HIGH energy cost. Often when I achieve those I don't get the other ones.