How To Defeat Progress By Setting Yourself Impossible Goals

Impossible goals are the key.

So I'm on the "A"s, in my ongoing label audit. I need to eliminate every single "A" label that has only 1 instance. I do this one of two ways: first. A key assumption: if the label has only 1 instance on THIS blog, then maybe it can be dispensed with entirely, right? It's dispensable. So that's one way. Dispense with the motherfucker.

The second way is, if a given 1-shot label turns out to be indispensable...let's say it adds "character" to the place...then I need to write a new post to go with that label. Push it up into the 2 bracket. Deal with it in the next round.

Backup strategy: check for any posts to which that label should justly have been applied already, and it was just left off. No fair nixing a perfectly good label over a simple oversight!

So anyway. "A" has forty-seven labels with only 1 instance on the blog. Forty-seven. 47. Forty-seven checks against the database for possible hits to expand into, relevant-post-wise. Potentially, 47 totally gratuitous posts to come up with, for the sole purpose of providing an additional toe-hold for some god-damn ostensible "indispensable" label. Failing all else, 47 possible blows of the dreaded ax. My poor labels! But we've got to do it. We have to suck it up. We can't run out of room on the max cap label total again! That was hell.

The trick to impossible goals is that they're not really impossible. It's just that they set up a prospect so daunting that you lost all interest in tackling it, ever. We call this "fostering an atmosphere of functionally pragmatic impossibility."

Nobody calls it that. I call it that. Fuck it. That's not even accurate - "functionally pragmatic"? The wrong thing's modifying the wrong thing!