What Makes A Good Writing Goal? – WNP 076

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 76: What Makes a Good Writing Goal?

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Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and if you are listening to this episode right when it comes out, we have just entered the year of 2020. It is currently January and it is the season of new beginnings, or at least it’s supposed to be. There is a lot of pressure at the beginning of each new year, at least here in the United States, I don’t know what other countries do around January, or if you even celebrate the new year around January, you might not, but whenever a new year begins, or in this case, even a new decade, there is a lot of pressure societally to make a resolution or to set goals or to do your planning for the new year or to become the person that you’ve always wanted to become.

Mixed in with all of the pressure is excitement and hope, which I really love. I really love hope and excitement and joy and people understanding that they have the potential to change and become a better version of themselves. I really like this time of year for that.

Oh, I don’t know how I feel, though, about New Year’s resolutions and about heaping expectations onto yourself during this time of year and focused on this time of year because I think we have the tendency to heap everything into the first few weeks of January and then get frustrated when our lives don’t take a 180 turn and we give up within the first few weeks of January, because what we don’t allocate for is the fact that change takes time. Real change takes time. It takes habit-building, it takes reinforcement, it takes commitment, and sometimes it takes accountability and encouragement from the community around us. We don’t always have these things. Once our hopes are dashed within the first week, maybe of setting a goal and not reaching it, or within the first week of setting a new resolution and not sticking to it, we abandon it because it’s depressing.

Now, I made an episode of the Write Now podcast about new years writing resolutions way back in 2015. If you want to check it out, it is episode 32 and I will link to it in the notes for this episode, but since then, I have to admit, I have not set a New Year’s resolution because of all the stuff that I talked about just a few minutes ago: the hopes, the expectations, the intense pressure, and then the ultimate, “I missed one writing session, so now I’m going to give up forever.” We get really unreasonable for some reason when we set resolutions and when we set goals.

Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different. I’m going to walk you through what I’ve been doing recently around goal setting for writing and for my business. Today’s episode is called What Makes a Good Writing Goal? Inevitably, this answer is going to be a little bit different for everyone. Some of you have never set a goal for anything in your entire life, while some of you have set goals and you’re used to it, this is part of your yearly planning, it’s part of your daily planning, it’s maybe part of what you have to do for your job or your career, it’s maybe something that you do with a partner or you work with your kids on it. I think everyone listening to this episode is going to be at a different stage in goal-setting and you’re going to have a different approach maybe. Take what I’m saying today with a grain of salt.

As Yoga with Adriene, I’ve been doing yoga recently just to increase my flexibility and some other medical stuff. She says, “Take what works and leave what doesn’t.” I’d love for you to have that attitude with today’s goal-setting chat: Take what works, leave what doesn’t.

In the second week of December 2019, I took a week… I don’t know if I want to say “I took the week off,” because I was still working really hard because that’s what you do when you run your own business. I took a week in early December to focus on setting 2020 personal and business goals. I went to a different coffee shop every day, and I followed along with a workbook that my mastermind group and I had decided to do together. The workbook challenged us to consider what is currently missing in your life that you’d like to be there. What are you currently afraid of? What is currently keeping you from living your best life and to becoming the best version of yourself? Or in my case, am I really writing what I want to be writing? Am I really prioritizing my writing? Is there a difference between the writing I do for my business and the writing that I do for myself? How blurry has that line become?

The planner I was using also encouraged us to think about segmenting life into eight different segments, so it’s segmented into health, friends, spouse or relationship or relationships, family, finances, spiritual or personal development, work, and recreation. Full disclosure, the system that I was using this year and that my mastermind group was using this year is called PowerSheets. If you’re interested in this, you can google it. It’s a really beautiful book. It’s a spiral-bound book and it has stickers on it and you know I’m a sucker for stickers. I don’t know a hundred percent if it was the right tool for me, but it definitely encouraged me to think. If you’re interested in this, I’m not necessarily selling it, but there’s a lot of different goal-setting strategies and planners out there, if you’re interested.

What I ended up doing was setting eight goals for the year 2020. I set one goal for each of the eight segments. This wasn’t necessarily something I had to do or even necessarily wanted to do, but it’s just the way that the planner was structured and I just fell into that pattern.

For health, my goal was to eat more plants and protein and continue cutting out refined or added sugar and to either walk, do yoga, do some kind of exercise five days a week.

For friends, this was hard for me because I’m an introvert and I spend a lot of time on the Internet, so most of my friends and my friendships are online and I realized that I’ve become a little bit of a hermit and that I haven’t had anyone over to my house for a long time. We’ll say that and be a little bit generous to me. My goal for friends was to intentionally hang out with a friend in real life once a week and even consider hosting people at my house, my real-life house for coffee, for tea, for dinner, for hanging out. That was my goal there.

My goal for finances is, don’t judge me too hard, I would like to make six figures in the year 2020 through a lot of different channels. I have my course about podcasting that I sell, it’s called Podcast Now, if you want to check it out, it will help you start your own successful podcast, through client work, through some other stuff I have going on in the background through Patreon, through support from listeners like you. I have all of these different income streams and I would like those to hit six figures this year.

I’m not going to go through every single one of these categories. I just want to give you a taste of what this sort of process guided me to do.

I guess last week, I got together with my mastermind group and we went through and we talked about our goals that we had set using the system. When it was my turn, I remember just looking down at my planner and I looked around at the other members of my group and I said, “You know what? I don’t really like any of these goals that I’ve set.” I couldn’t pinpoint why.

I don’t know if you ever feel like this with any of the goals that you set, especially as they relate to writing. It was really funny. I had some realizations later, so I thought about it. It takes me a long time to think about things and mentally digest things sometimes because, well, I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s because I’m an introvert or because I’m just a little bit slow or what that might be, but it took me a couple hours and then that stretched into a couple of days and I realized a couple of things:

I realized that, perhaps most glaringly, I had not set any goals about writing. Even though this is where I see my primary identity, even though this is the thing that brings me the most joy and fulfillment in life, I had set zero goals related to writing.

I also realized that the goals I had set all felt like shoulds, like, “Okay, yeah, I guess I should eat better. Okay, yes, I guess I should exercise five days a week. Okay, yeah, I guess I should do this and I should do this.” When I looked at them all together, it just felt tedious, like I had established this huge new set of rules that I needed to follow and live by: “Okay, no more sugar. Okay, I’ve got to do meal-planning every Sunday night. Okay, I have to make sure that I schedule an exercise five days a week. Okay, I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to do this.”

I realize that everyone is different and that there are people out there, perhaps yourself included, who love having a list of things to do, who love having a routine, who thrive on a schedule, but try as I might, I am not built that way. I mean, I can follow a schedule, I can check things off of a list, but I’ve realized something about myself and that is when I do that, when I live into that rubric or framework, I start to panic because the scarcity mindset takes over, that, “Oh my gosh, you’re frittering away all of your creative time doing these tasks and there’s going to be no more time in your life and no more space in your life for you to stretch your creative wings and fly.”

I texted some of my digital friends and I said, “Oh, you guys, I spent all this time brainstorming these goals for 2020 and all I ended up with was a list of things that seem like a total drag. Every day has turned into a checklist of tedious things. That’s not what I want my life to be. That’s the opposite of what I want my life to be,” which is funny because that’s what this goal-creation process was supposed to do for me, was supposed to light up and guide me toward a better version of my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I like doing yoga, I like walking, I like writing, I like making money from my business, I like spending time with friends, but something still felt off about these goals I had set. Again, namely, there wasn’t any room for writing. Several of my friends texted back and asked me both a very simple and very difficult question: “What is it you want?” Not, “What do you think you should do, but what do you, as a living, breathing, amazing human being, what do you want?”

It reminded me of years ago when I created a personal mission statement. I’m going to be referencing a lot of old Write Now episodes today. I don’t know if you remember this, but back in episode 46 of the Write Now podcast, I talked about crafting your mission statement as a writer, or in other words, understanding what is meaningful for you and what you want out of the writing experience.

If you haven’t listened to that episode, I would encourage you to go and listen to it. I’ll have a link to it in the show notes for today’s episode. Again, it was episode 46 of the Write Now podcast, but I realized that all of these goals I had set were out of alignment with what I wanted with my mission statement.

My mission statement from years ago is this kind of long, flowery thing about making the world a better place and nurturing creative souls and all of that stuff, but basically, it boils down to: I want to create cool stuff and I want to inspire and encourage other creators and none of my goals related to my mission statement.

Let’s take a look at what makes a good goal. Specifically for today’s episode, what makes for a good writing goal? Back when I worked in the corporate worlds, we had goal-setting sessions and we had a rubric around which we were encouraged to establish our goals. This was, maybe you’ve heard of this, it was called “SMART goal-making.” “SMART” was an acronym, so each of the letters in “SMART” stood for something. The S stood for, I think, specific. The M stood for measurable. The R stood for relevant. The A stood for attainable. The R stood for relevant. T stood for time-bound.

Essentially, if your goals are specific, that means that they are focused on something specific. If they were measurable, it meant that you knew when you had achieved them. If they were attainable, it meant that they were realistic and you wouldn’t be like, “I want to lose 600 pounds,” when you don’t even waste 600 pounds. Relevant was: Does it actually matter to the organization? Then T, time-bound meant “Is there a due date for this so that you just can’t drag it on forever and never accomplish it?”

That was the rubric that I was initially taught to follow when setting goals. Maybe you use this, maybe you are a fan of this. I think that in a way, I like it if you’re looking for a very strict or very structured way of setting and meeting goals. If you like that rubric, I encourage you to use it. There’s different versions of it floating around out there, so it’s very common.

That’s what I learned to set goals by, so when I would have my quarterly job review, I would have these goals like, “Okay, I need to create a new strategy for our clients. I would like to do three new strategies. I would like them to increase the client’s click-through rates on their website by 70% and I want this to happen by March 30th.” That’s what my goals would look like, they would be those “SMART goals.” You can do this for writing if you want, but for me it was… I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t like structure. Maybe I just don’t like rules. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I just had this knee-jerk reaction because I didn’t want to be working for someone else.

In any case, I’ve modified or created my own rubric for goal-setting, which you are welcome to use, if you like. For this, I will use the example of the goal being to write 200 words per day. Maybe this is your exact goal. Maybe your goal is a thousand words per day or 10 words per day, or maybe you don’t even like to think about word count, maybe you just want to write every day until it feels good, or you want to fill up one page per day or two pages per day, whatever your goal is. The example that I’m going to use for today is 200 words per day.

For me, I have three different categories and each one of these is on a sliding scale. Think of it as if you’ve ever gone bowling and you see the bumpers in the gutters. Okay, I’m terrible at bowling and I always secretly wish that I could have those bumpers in the gutters so that when you roll your ball down the… Oh, boy, I almost said “down the aisle thing.” That’s how bad of a bowler I am, I don’t even know the terminology, but when you roll your bowling ball down the lane, ooh, “lane,” I think that’s what it is, there’s a very good chance for me, at least, that it will move to one side or the other and fall into the gutter.

But for little kids, they put these things in the gutters bumpers so that the ball cannot possibly go into the gutter and it will hopefully inevitably hit one of the pins at the end of the lane. Think of these, each side of this bowling lane, there’s bumpers on either side to keep you focused on your goal and on one side for the first challenge here: Is it realistic? Is your goal realistic? On the other side of the spectrum is: Is your goal challenging?

We’ll talk about this for a second. We want our writing goal to be achievable. We want it to be realistic. I can set literally any number of words per day or pages per day as my writing goal for 2020. I could say, “I want to write 400,000 words per day.” Yeah, I can want that. Is it realistic? No. When I say something’s “realistic” or “not realistic,” I’m not telling you to dampen your light. I’m not telling you to not try hard, which is why the other bumper on the other side of this bowling lane is: Is it challenging?

I would love to see you have a happy medium between those two things, because while I want your goal to be realistic, I also don’t want you to say, “Yeah, my goal is three words per day,” when you’re capable of doing more, when you are also in a place of growth, when you want to grow and develop yourself as a writer. Is your goal realistic yet challenging? For me, realistic yet challenging is 200 words per day. It’s doable, it’s realistic, I’ve done it before, but it’s also challenging because I have to make the time and space to do it, which means that I am going to grow as a writer.

All right, number two: Is your goal measurable? If so, how? I ask this because our minds tend to grow and shift as we grow and our perceptions of success tend to grow and shift as well. I encourage people to set goals that are measurable so that their goals don’t get away from them.

Here’s an example of what I mean: An example of a measurable goal is “I would like to write 200 words per day.” It’s measurable because at the end of each day, I can look and see if I have written 200 words. That’s measurable. A goal that’s not measurable would be, “I want to write more in 2020.” Okay, more compared to what? I don’t want to put down people who have set this as a goal, or sometimes the goal is “I want to get better at writing.” Okay, but where is that bar and how can you know at the end of the year whether or not you’ve achieved this goal? How do you know what better means and how can you tell me whether or not you’ve met this goal?

I say this because I see a lot of people get frustrated and they say, “My goal for 2020 is I want to write more,” and maybe they do, but “more” becomes their new normal, so at the end of the year, they’re disappointed because there’s no upper limit on that goal. They can’t say, “Oh, I was successful because I met or exceeded this goal,” they just say, “I want to write more” and more goes on forever. There’s no finish line for more or better. There’s a bumper-bowling situation here, too. On the other side of the spectrum from measurable is flexible. I would love for your goal to be measurable yet flexible.

Sure, you can say, “I would like to write 200 words every day,” but it’s okay if you give yourself a little bit of grace. It’s okay if you write 175 words on a Friday night or if you miss a day because your daughter is sick or because you got stuck at work or because you’re dealing with a particularly bad bout of depression. Keep your goal measurable so that it doesn’t just bloat and go on forever, but also keep it flexible. Keep it flexible so that if you miss a day, the entire year isn’t ruined and your entire career as a writer isn’t over. Be kind to yourself. Life is not always perfect.

Now, you can err on the side of being too flexible, so you get home from work and you just don’t feel like writing and you’re like, “Eh, I’m flexible. I don’t have to do this today.” I don’t necessarily want you to hit that bumper. I want you to stick to the whole realistic versus challenging thing. I would like you to challenge yourself. I would like you to try to do it and try to hit that goal. Somewhere between measurable and flexible or maybe measurable yet flexible, I don’t know if it’s necessarily a spectrum in that case, so we have realistic yet challenging, then we also have measurable yet flexible.

My third set of guidelines for a good writing goal is: Is it meaningful? I spoke a little bit earlier about my mission statement as a writer and for me, a goal is meaningful if it helps me move forward with my mission statement as a writer. I’ll give you a little bit of an example here, too. When we talk about meaningful goals, what we’re saying is that some goals matter and some goals don’t. Some goals will help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve and some goals won’t.

What I’m talking about here is the difference between meaningful metrics and vanity metrics. You can establish a writing goal of “I would like to write 200 words per day.” Is it meaningful? Yes, because it will help me fulfill my mission statement of creating cool stuff and encouraging and inspiring other writers.

Now, if my goal is maybe not meaningful, here’s an example of that: “I want to get 65 new followers on Twitter every week.” I mean, it’s a goal and it’s measurable, but is it meaningful? Will getting 65 new Twitter followers every week help me create cool stuff or will it just make me feel better about myself, will it just be a nice ego boost?

There’s a slippery slope between meaningful metrics and vanity metrics, but essentially, meaningful metrics will help you achieve what you want to achieve. It will go back to answering that question we first asked: What is it you want? What do you want to do? Who do you want to become? Whereas a vanity metric, it looks cool and it makes you look like you’re successful, but it actually doesn’t really move the needle for you that much. It’s really easy to focus on the wrong things. It’s really easy to focus on those vanity metrics, especially if everyone around us is focusing on those vanity metrics, too, but all they are is vanity. They’re skin deep. They’re not going to help you improve as a writer. They’re not going to help you grow as a writer. They’re not going to help you get more words under your belt, get more experience.

I told you I would have three bumper-bowling examples here. On the other side of meaningful, for me, and you can structure these however you want, but for me on the other side of meaningful, the other bumper is: Is it fun and exciting? Does it get you stoked? Does it make you really excited to dig in and do your work or does it make you dread your life?

I realized years ago that fun is important to me. It might not be important to you, but for me, what is life if it’s not fun and exciting? I know that sounds like something a little kid would say, but I think that’s where a lot of our creativity comes from is that child instinct. I think as we grow up, as we put aside childish things, I think we also stifle and dampen our creativity and the sheer joy that comes from creating. That’s why I want to balance meaningful with fun and exciting because I don’t want this to be drudgery for you. I want you to leap out of bed every morning and be like, “Oh, my gosh, I get to write 200 words today on my project, maybe more. I’m very excited.”

Those are my three spectrums for crafting a good writing goal. It’s not a perfect system, it’s something that I’m still working on, but for now, I would love to challenge you to see if your goals are realistic, yet challenging, measurable yet flexible and meaningful yet fun and exciting. I think if you follow this rubric or something loosely like it, this can be a great guide to setting writing goals that make you feel awesome and that help you become the writer that you want to be.

The reason I’m doing this podcast episode today is because I’m redoing my 2020 goals. I’m still going to eat healthy, I’m still going to take good care of myself and get exercise, but my 2020 goals are rooted in things related to my mission statement and to the person I want to become, to the writer I want to become. I want to release Girl in Space season two, which means I need to outline and write Girl in Space season two. I have a new project that has been hanging out in my brain for months and months and I would love to dive into that. There’s so many things I want to accomplish and I know that there are things you want to accomplish, so let’s do this together step by step and, hopefully, have fun along the way.

As you know, I do not make the Write Now podcast alone. I have several amazing and wonderful backers on Patreon who helped pay for hosting costs and keep this show ad-free for everyone. Patreon is a secure third-party donation platform that lets you give a dollar per episode or $2 per episode or $10 per episode or whatever you feel moved to give on a recurring basis. It’s been such a wonderful thing in my life. Depending on what level you contribute at, you get different perks. Right now, I’m offering access to a private exclusive writers’ mastermind group digitally on Discord for the people who donate $10 or more per episode, so I’d love to invite you to do that.

Current patrons that I would love to thank for helping make this episode possible include Susan Geiger, Sean Lock, Leslie Madsen, Amanda Dixon, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Michael Beckwith, Selena Zhang, Maria Alejandro, Leslie Duncan, and Gary Medina. You are all so wonderful. Thank you. I would not do this without your support, so thank you so very much. It means the world to me.

Again, if you would like to join their ranks and to become a patron on Patreon, I will have a link to that in the show notes for today’s episode, or you can go to sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R dot com. Go to podcasts and go to Write Now and there should be a place where you can choose to support the show. Otherwise, if you want to not navigate my website and go straight to Patreon, you can do that as well. You can find me at patreon.com, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash sarahrheawerner. That’s all one word: S-A-R-A-H-R-H-E-A-W-E-R-N-E-R.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode of the Write Now podcast. I hope that it has inspired you to set new goals for yourself or to adjust previous goals for yourself, or even think about setting a goal for yourself. Even if you decide not to do it, I want you to start thinking about the writer that you want to be: Who do you want to become? What do you want out of the experience? Start thinking about that. Maybe even start journaling about it. I think that you’ll be very interested and surprised by what you find out about yourself.

With that, this has been episode 76 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers, professional writers, and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner. I’m going to go and start revising my 2020 goals.

[Closing music.]