Celebrating Small Wins

I hate spelling. Plus, I have a list to note all my small weekly wins. If you find "spelling the word achievements" at the top of that list, you would understand how much I struggled with it. But is it still a small thing I did? Is it worth being put there?

Well, let me give you a glimpse of what my weekly achievements list looks like:

- Finished a book

- 2 days of drinking 1L of water

- Understood Chapter 14 (analysis)

- Cleaned my laptop desktop

And yes, I would be very proud of myself for accomplishing that by the end of each week.

How do I specify my achievements? First, they are not habits or things I do on a weekly or daily basis. Secondly, they basically are my weekly to-do lists, and if I completed them with a bit of struggle, I count them as achievements. This action may seem insignificant on a larger scale or compared to what we always associate achievements with. It gives you a weekly opportunity to start over if you messed up and set new goals or add items to your list that you wanted to do but could not. You will not stop and get demotivated because of a small setback; you still can celebrate them at the end of the next week. It is a new year every week.

Starting this process of recording the small wins begun two years ago, with fifty-two weekly reviews safe and sound in my notion. Me taking a break from doing that last year resulted in not achieving even half of my yearly goals and a kind of recklessness in how I managed my days. I felt aimless, doing things when I felt like doing and stopping if I had to put in the smallest effort. As you may have already guessed, now I am on week 15 of this year's reviews, and writing this is on top of my to-do list this week plus if you are reading it then it's on my list of victories already.

I listened to this amazing person who talked about the same idea from a different perspective. She was saying that we always measure our small successes compared to our bigger goals or the end result of what we want to be. We see how far we are behind on that goal we are or how small the action was in comparison to it. By doing that we get discouraged and distracted, ending up not doing anything towards that goal at all. Dividing large/yearly goals into weekly or monthly measurable chunks and celebrating each step you make (compared to a reasonable standard) is what's going to get you there.

Now on how we can really do that and keep doing it. Recording and then celebrating your small wins can be done in very different ways and using different tools. This is how I do it and some alternative ways I recommend doing. Let us begin, well I use Notion to do that and everything in my life. Anyway, I make weekly reviews on Sundays. I write what I have to do and other things I like to measure, and I keep the list visible when I first open Notion so every time I do anything I can add it and check if it was already on my weekly list. <I will add the template I use in the resources>. Secondly, which is the more convenient way, is to use the Notes app on your phone. Set a folder called "achievements" and inside it have a note for each week and pin it to the top of your notes for easy access so you can record your wins every time you do something and read it by the end of the week while setting the goals and tasks for the next week. And finally, the old-fashioned way, always keep a small notebook and pen by your side, have a page for each week, and basically do the same. Just remember that if you did great, be proud; if you did not, you always have a next week to improve. To summarize, record every small win you achieve in your day <habits are excluded>, reflect on it by the end of the week and finally set your plan for the next one.

My Take on celebrating small wins: For us to really reach the top of what we want we have to take the stairs, there are no jetpacks or shortcuts we can make that will get us any faster so celebrating our small successes can motivate us to keep climbing up until we hit our goals. Sometimes we will move fast and others maybe we will take a break but each milestone gets us closer to where we want to go and where we deserve to be just keep climbing.

Thanks for reading.

Resources:

To Achieve Success, Start Detecting Your Small Wins | Mehrnaz Bassiri

Weekly Review Notion Template [duplicate to use]

PS. Happy Eid. It is the day we celebrate Ramadan’s work in a step to achieving our ultimate goal inshallah. Allah’s mercy.