I have something in my life I like to call an accomplishment trap, and they are best to be avoided. Maybe you have these in your life as well. You might call them something else, or perhaps you haven’t noticed them yet, and like someone still trapped in the Matrix, you just get this feeling that something is wrong when you are working toward your goals. That thing could be an accomplishment trap.
These pesky traps can show up anywhere in your life. I liken it to running a marathon. If you set out to run a marathon, what is your goal? For most people, it will be to finish with an added bonus goal of finishing under a certain time. You might track that by mile markers, or even by landmarks, it doesn’t matter. Each of those is not an accomplishment trap. Let’s add in a smartwatch—common equipment for a runner to have. You want to put that information to work, so maybe you track your heart rate too. In light of that, you try to get your heart rate to hit a certain number in the first mile. The human mind hungers for goals. We want that sense of accomplishment. It’s one of the reasons why video games are so good at holding our attention. This is an accomplishment trap though. It is a mini-goal that is not in service of the bigger goal at hand. It could even work to the detriment of your overall goal. You could work so hard to get that heart rate up in the first mile, that you tire prematurely and are unable to finish or get a time that you are happy with.
The same thing happens in writing. I want to write a bio for each character. I want to write 1,000 words at a writing meet-up. I want to average an 80 WPM this writing session. At the end of the day, with goals like these, you end up with several bios that are never useful or become outdated as your characters change, you have 1,000 words that were written while distracted half of which end up needing to be scrapped, and the words that come out at an 80 wpm clip might as well have been holes you were punching in your pages and in your plot.
Of course, what ultimately matters here is your overall goal which could be different from person to person or project to project. After all, not all people who enter a marathon care if they complete the race, that might just be a bonus. Maybe you don’t care if you finish your novel either. Maybe you just want to experiment with writing and spending dozens of hours writing scenes that would never go in your novel if you finished it, is not a wasted effort or an accomplishment trap. People come into writing with many goals. Maybe you want to meet people, maybe you want to understand more of what goes into making the novels you love, or maybe you are that rare bird that just wants to have fun.
Whenever you find yourself chasing some mini-goal, ensure it’s in service of your larger goal and not a pesky accomplishment trap.

Quote of the Moment:

“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson