Every Minute Counts...Literally

Mood Tools Week 3: How To Set Goals You'll Actually Meet

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Last week I talked about all-or-something thinking as a way to tap into the power of short bursts of work—do five minutes twelve times, and you’ve worked for an hour, after all. But no matter how gleefully we embrace small chunks when we need to, that glee will inevitably be challenged by your inner clip-board wielding pragmatist who takes one look at the chasm between the hour you spent on a rough draft of a single scene and the remaining gargantuan task of actually finishing the rest of the novel and says, chop-chop.

Which is the moment when most writers give into the siren call of bombastic goals.

I won’t spend a lot of time on why we do this—writing novels takes so long that I’m convinced the Adam and Eve story is actually a metaphor for writerly shortcuts¹—but I do want to talk about the consequences of repeatedly setting and missing big goals. Because while we’re not going to get kicked out of Eden for failing to write any one chapter we promised ourselves we’d finish, if we make a habit of setting and missing bombastic goals eventually it will feel exactly like we’ve being tossed from the Eden of our creative lives with the added shame that it wasn’t some hoary-haired Old Testament god who gave us the boot but our own stupid lazy selves.

To be clear, we are neither stupid nor lazy, of course, but it’s hard to defend ourselves against the slanderous voices in our head that rattle off a list of missed goals that goes on and on and—it has to be said—on:

• I’ll write a quick rough draft of my novel in a month!  (nope)

• I’ll write a page a day and finish the year with a 365-page draft. (nope)

• Or—like me who realized I had twelve days off for spring break this month—if I commit to the roughest of drafts and finish a chapter every two days, I can totally finish the draft by the end of break. (hahaha-nope).

But instead of thinking for one minute how criminally overambitious our splashy goals were, we tell ourselves we truly don’t deserve the Eden of our writing lives and stop writing.²

My goal game didn’t improve until a kindly teacher introduced me to the concept of SMART Goals. SMART is an acronym to help you set goals that meet five criteria to help increase our likelihood of success. Goals should be (s)pecific, (m)easurable, (a)chievable, (r)ealistic, and (t)ime-bound³. For example, if you’re setting a new year’s resolution, it’s less effective to set a goal to write more than it is to set a goal to finish a draft of your new novel by the end of the year.

As smart as SMART goals may be, my trouble with them was that even though the word realistic was listed right there in black and white as one of the five criteria, I still tended to overpromise, run myself ragged, and then feel disappointed when I missed (yet) another goal.

It wasn’t until I read John Acuff’s Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done that goal-setting started to click for me. Acuff suggests that when you set a smart goal, you should do one of two things immediately: double the amount of time you think the project will take or cut the goal in half. The part of me that was still addicted to splashy goals rebelled against this decidedly unsexy advice as surely as a toddler rebels at bedtime. Cutting my goal in half was no fun—a novel isn’t finished at the halfway point, afterall—and the idea of doubling the time for a project that already felt like it was taking eons made me decidedly grumpy.

But there’s only one thing for resistance this strong—admit that the advice is likely onto something, silence the screaming toddler, and give it a try, dammit.

So I broke down my big ultimate goal—finish the novel—into five sections and used those as big goal posts—each time I reached a goal post I was twenty percent of the way closer to finishing the entire book. Each of those five sections was broken down into chapters—smaller goal posts—and because I follow a six-step process to complete a chapter, each of those chapters represented six micro goal posts on the way to finishing a chapter on the way to finishing a section on the way to (eventually!) finishing the whole damn book. Maybe it’s because I’m a great lover of lists, but reaching all those individual goal posts has been much more satisfying than keeping one impossibly large goal post—write a novel—at the top of my to-do list for years.

After reading Acuff, I also made the conceptual switch from content goals to time goals. A goal to finish a given chapter by the end of the month is all well and good, but if I get into a particularly thorny chapter and realize that what I really need to do is strip the chapter down to its studs and rewrite it entirely, a month may not be enough time. So either I’d miss my goal and feel disappointed in myself (again) or—and this was much worse—I’d talk myself out of the work I knew needed to be done in the interest of reaching my goal, a choice that inevitably led to feeling disappointed in myself for my lack of creative integrity. So instead of setting a specific content goal in any given month, I switched to time goals: This month I will work x hours on a given section of my book. If I finish a couple of chapters, excellent! If I had to strip the chapter to studs and start again, also excellent as long as I put in my time.

After a few months meeting time goals I started to feel confidence in my process. Moreover, I got into the habit of tracking my writing hours on the Clockify app to keep a record of how many hours I’d worked on my novel on any given day or week or month or year. After years of tracking my hours, I’m now starting to inch back into content goals. Last summer I used my writing data to determine a realistic goal for finishing my current revision by counting the hours it took me to finish the chapters I’d already written, setting up a ratio for the number of chapters I had remaining, and solving for a rough estimate of total number of hours it should take to finish the book. Then I added extra time for chapters I expected to be particularly tough—the scenes at the start of new sections, the scene with the giant clash, and the chapters at the end of the book. After adding an extra month to my target date to allow for hiccups and time off, I finally had my target date.⁴

That said, if you haven’t tracked your time, you won’t have years of data to help you understand your writing metabolism, but that’s OK. Start tracking now so you’ll have data later, but in the mean time, set goals in the spirit of exploration—when one month comes to an end and you’re looking at what you planned to do and what you actually did, either celebrate your win or get curious about why there’s a gap—Did your writing time get poached by a work project in week two?—then use that information to set a smarter goal the next month.

And if setting SMART goals feels like too much to ask while you’re working on early drafts, try ART goals instead. I just made that acronym up, but I think it’s a great marriage of being realistic and fanning the spark:

(A) stands for Awesome or Alluring or Animating—The idea here is to reconnect with why this project was so important to you that you decided to write a whole book about it. “To you” being the key phrase here. If you want to write a comedy- horror-space odyssey because its makes you smile in a world where there’s not a lot to smile about, that’s your privilege, and I both applaud your spirit and very much look forward to reading your book.

(R) stands for realistic—Look, I get that if you’re writing a comedy-horror-space odyssey, the realism of tracking hours isn’t the sexy romp you’re looking for, but I swear that realism in goal setting is the single sexiest thing you can do for your writing. Where taking repeated swings at splashy goals you miss makes you start to doubt your writing, taking repeated swings at realistic goals you knock out of the park makes you start to believe—truly believe—in your writing, I promise.

(T) stands for time or tenacity. If you want have a time goal, go for it. But if you’re at the start of a new project and don’t feel you know enough to set a time goal yet, then embrace tenacity instead of time, where tenacity is a promise to yourself that whenever doubt creeps in you’ll take a deep breath and put in the time.

I will warn you that though you’ll get better at ignoring the siren call of splashy bombastic goals in favor of your SMART (or ART) goals, every once in a while, you’ll give in to the thrill of taking a big swing and convince yourself that you might really be able to finish six chapters in twelve days.

Occasionally you’ll hit a splashy goal out of the park—and those are sweet moments, indeed—but once you’ve adopted SMART goals, even when you swing for splashy goals and miss—as I did this week—you’ll shrug those misses off more easily.

Yes, I took a big swing and missed this week—I did not, in fact, finish six chapters in twelve days—but I missed because my old plan for the end of the book didn’t match the writing I’ve done since that plan was first written, and I needed time to reread pivotal scenes, freewrite about possible new endings, and cut six chapters down to four chapters and an epilogue. So even though I missed my splashy goal this week, I return to my regularly-scheduled goal with a tighter outline and the excitement of knowing the end is even nearer than I’d thought.

How about you? How do you set goals for your creative projects?

Take Away from Mood Tools Week 3: Every Minute Counts…Literally

“Where taking repeated swings at splashy goals you miss makes you start to doubt your writing, taking repeated swings at realistic goals you knock out of the park makes you start to believe—truly believe—in your writing, I promise.”

1. Which would make the snake ChatGPT4, but I digress.

2. If you’d like to read more about how to deal with your inner critic, see the Mood Tools Week One.

3. Some formulations of SMART goals swap out other words for the starting letter—simple instead of specific or relevant instead of realistic, say—but the general idea is the same.

4. Truly, I can’t recommend Clockify enough—I know that free app is supposed to be for businesses, but after my pens, my laptop, and the program I used to back up my work, Clockify is my favorite writing tool!