3 Tips for Making Writing Goals

Goal making — probably one of my favorite things to do. And nothing will make you feel more accomplished than setting goals and crushing them. There are a few things I do when looking to make goals + setting myself up to succeed.

3 Tips for Making Writing Goals

Choose your time frame

Are you looking at creating goals for a week? Month? Three months? The first step is to decide on your time frame. I, personally, like to work on goals monthly, but you could break it down even further for weekly goals or map them out longer and do more quarterly goal-setting (or expert level … all three!)

Make reasonable goals

Write down everything you want to get done. A lot of times my goals consist of word count for whatever novel I’m working on, but could also include the number of blog posts I want to write and publish, newsletters, pages edited, or novel prep work — everything that has to do with my personal writing life gets thrown on the list! Now, look at your list and your time frame. Hopefully, you already have outside commitments mapped out on your time frame (if not, hit pause and do that). Make sure your goals match up with the time frame you have. For example. My goal for this past month was to write 25k on my current WIP. Knowing that I wanted to use Saturdays as catch-up days and wanted to take Sundays completely off, I had to create goals that reflected that. Also, knowing that I’d most likely only have time to work on drafting, I needed to slim down my to-do list to only what was the most important (for example: in addition to drafting, continuing to make sure I post one blog post a month instead of trying to add a second or third as well).

Don’t beat yourself up

If you don’t meet your goals, don’t beat yourself up. Use it to grow. Why didn’t you meet your goals? Did you over-commit, or were you more invested in Netflix binging than you were in crushing your goals? Also know that sometimes when you don’t meet your goal, it’s not necessarily your fault. Last year I made the goal to blog a novel in a month. When I made the goal, my kids were enrolled in public school, and my client workload was light. A week later, our family made the decision to homeschool, I took on three more clients, and the first two weeks of the month, I ended up house-sitting at a farm with no wifi. I did what I could, but I didn’t finish my goals (and probably should have reassessed before diving into the month thinking I could do it all).

What about you? What tips do you have for making writing goals?