If you haven’t already, this is a great time to set some goals. Not resolutions. We all know how those end up. I’m talking about real, attainable goals for your writing career.
Your goal could be time-based, for example, to spend an hour writing every day. Or it could be productivity based, such as writing 5,000 words per week.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but ideally your goals will be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Time-sensitive
So “I want to finish my novel” is only measurable in that you can tell when it’s done. A SMART goal would be “I want to add 10,000 words to my novel each month for eight months.”
That requires writing just over 300 words a day, so only you can decide whether that’s attainable and realistic for you. I can write 600 words an hour, so 300 words a day would be totally do-able for me if only I would protect that time. But lately I’ve been using it for church work and paying jobs and…umm…Facebook. D’oh.
An important aspect of planning your daily or weekly writing goal is tracking your own productivity. Of course, I have a spreadsheet for that: Sample Writer’s Work Log. Track your productivity for a while to help determine what goals will be realistic and attainable for you.
While you’re at it, set some goals for other parts of your life, too. For example, I recently subscribed to some courses in the iTunes U app, with the goal of studying business and religion for an hour each evening.
Happy New Year, friends. Thanks for letting me join you on this journey.