Today I wanted to talk about a process I go through every winter season to set goals and break them down into manageable pieces. Every year, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I take some time out with my journal and iPad in hand, and I map out my coming year.
Mapping Out the Calendar
Before I set goals, I do a calendar exercise where I put a copy of the upcoming year’s calendar all on one page. Each row represents a month, and the numbers in that row are the individual days. Using a marker or highlighter (or a more high-tech option, an Apple pencil and app called Paper), I block off windows of time that I need for various projects. I also color-code things so that each type of DIY MFA project (workshops, courses, HUB) gets a different color. This way I can see at a glance where my calendar is already full and where I have space to play.
I used to do this exercise on paper with different colored markers, but nowadays I use the more high-tech option, which makes it easy for me to edit things as plans ebb and flow throughout the year. My team and I call this the “kooky calendar” and it’s not set in stone, it gives us an overall roadmap for the year ahead so we have a general sense of what’s happening and when.
Climbing the Mountain
I like to think of writing books as being like climbing a mountain. Now, truth be told, I’ve never scaled a major mountain myself (the most I’ve done is hike up to the top of a small hill near campus when I was in college). Still, I think the analogy holds true. When you think about a big project—like climbing a mountain—there are a couple of different considerations.
Choose the Right Mountain
Your mountain is your “big vision” and the first thing you have to do is make sure you’re climbing the right mountain. After all, it does you no good to scale Everest if what you really wanted to do was reach the top of Kilimanjaro. The same thing is true with a big project. You have to make sure you’re tackling the right project, and for the right reasons. Writing a book is a big project, one that should not be taken on out of obligation or guilt. If you want to write a book, you need to want to write that book.
You also want to make sure you’re writing the right kind of book for you. Sure, it’s important to consider the market and what may or may not sell, but if you write a book solely based on market trends, you are fighting a losing battle. First off, things that are trending now won’t be trending two or three years from now (when your book finally hits the shelves). Plus, you have to live with your book for a long time, reading and rereading it throughout the drafting and revision process. If you don’t love the project, it’s going to be painful.
Plant the Flag
When people climb mountains and they get to the top, what do they do? They plant a flag to signal that they were there, that they reached the peak. Planting a flag is a symbol that you’ve conquered one mountain and are ready to pursue the next goal.
Writing a book is very similar. It’s important to have a symbol, something that signals that you’ve reached your goal and are ready to move onto the next thing. This plant-the-flag moment is going to be different for every writer. For one it might be holding a printed copy of the book in their hand. For another, it might be doing their first author signing. For still another it might be getting an award.
Regardless of what that plant-the-flag moment is, it should be a tangible, concrete event. Something that you can point to and say, “Yes! I did that.”
Determine the Milestones
The milestones are the big phases of your larger project, kind of like the places you set up camp when you scale a big mountain. You don’t try to climb the whole thing bottom to top, you just focus on getting to the next place where you’ll set up camp for the night. In terms of goal setting, basically you take your larger project and break it down into three-to-five overarching steps. For example, if your goal is to write and traditionally publish a novel, your milestones might be:
- Finish a rough draft.
- Do revisions.
- Query agents.
- Go through the publisher’s editorial process.
- Launch the book.
These are not small action steps, but larger sub-projects leading to your big vision of writing and publishing your book. It’s important to break the big vision into smaller milestones because it makes the overall project feel more manageable. After all, “write and publish a book” can feel overwhelming to many writers, but finishing a draft—though still a big task—can feel a little less daunting.
Still, it’s important to recognize that these milestones are not small steps that can get done in a day. Rather, they are sub-projects that might take weeks or months to complete. This is why we must break our milestones down into action steps.
Break Things into Action Steps
Here is where the rubber meets the road. The key to completing your milestones (and thereby also reaching your big vision) is to break those milestones down into manageable action steps. These should be bite-sized steps that you can start and finish in one sitting. The idea is for you to feel that sense of accomplishment when you complete an action step. This is why action steps should be small, concrete, and easy to complete.
For example, let’s suppose your milestone is “finish a rough draft.” Unless you’re incredibly prolific (or are willing to sacrifice your sleep and sanity), you won’t be able to finish a draft in a day. But what you can do is break that draft down into manageable chunks.
Let’s suppose you can easily write 1,000 words per weekday. That means that in one week you’ll have 5,000 words. If a typical novel is 80,000 words, then it’s just simple math: 80,000 divided by 5,000 is 16. This means it will take you 16 weeks of writing (or a little under four months) to complete your draft. Then, all you have to do is stick to the program and knock out those 1,000 daily words.
Or as another example, let’s imagine you’re gearing up for your book launch and you want to weave podcast appearances into your launch strategy. First you may want to do some research on how to give good podcast interviews. (Here’s a post that walks you through the before, during, and after.) Next, you need to make a list of potential podcasts you’ll want to pitch. Making the list might be quick, but researching the various shows may take more time, so you may want to break that task into small batches of 2-3 podcasts.
After that, you need to start pitching. One action step might be to write a pitch letter template. (While you’ll want to personalize each pitch, it can help to have a template to work from.) Then you’ll need to start sending out pitches, one at a time.
When it comes to tracking complex action steps, I’m a big fan of using project management software. Currently, my team uses a program called Asana. It’s a great piece of software and has a lot of bells and whistles, but for many writers it’s likely much more than you need. Other software I’ve used in the past is Trello and ToDoist (both of which offer free plans). For many, even just a simple spreadsheet tracking daily word count can be sufficient. The point is, that it’s incredibly easy to lose track of how much progress you’ve made if you don’t keep a written record. So, find a way to record your progress and keep track of how far you’ve come.
Here’s a diagram showing the big vision broken down into milestones and then further separated into action steps:
What If You Hate to Set Goals?
Many writers—particularly “pantsers” who write by the seat of their pants—tend to resist goal setting. They want to throw themselves into their projects and write with abandon, not worrying about where that project might lead.
This is all well and good, and some creative exploration is important, particularly at the early stages of a career. But at some point, you’ll need to have a plan if you want to make good progress. It’s important to plan and set goals, especially if you’re juggling more than one big project at the same time.
At DIY MFA, we often have multiple projects in the hopper simultaneously. We might be gearing up to launch a workshop and have a course on the back-burner, ready to be launched soon thereafter. Plus, I often have multiple writers I’m working with one-on-one, and we have regular “maintenance work” we need to keep up with, like producing these Writer Fuel newsletters and the subsequent posts on our website.
Without setting goals, it’s hard to tell what’s important and will make the most impact, versus what’s just urgent and needs to get done right away. There’s a concept in time management called the Eisenhower Matrix, which looks at projects in terms of their importance and urgency.
Things that are neither important nor urgent can be removed from your task list altogether. Similarly, things that are urgent but not necessarily important can get delegated. The problem is, we often conflate urgency with importance and we’ll get tied up doing unimportant-but-urgent tasks when we should be focusing on the tasks that really matter.
This is where things get tricky. The temptation is to swat flies and focus all our energy on the urgent tasks that need to be done right now. But what about those important long-term tasks? They may not be urgent right this second, but they are often the things that move us closer to our goals.
Writing a book is an important-but-not-urgent task. Unless you’re under contract and on a deadline, you probably don’t have anyone waiting with bated breath for you to finish your manuscript. The task may not have an immediate deadline and it’s up to you to keep moving the ball down the field. With important-but-not-urgent tasks, the key is to schedule the time. You have to make sure you carve out room in your schedule and break that big project into small, manageable tasks so you can. Get. It. Done.
This is why goal setting matters. Without goals, we don’t know what tasks are important and what tasks are just urgent. Goal setting allows us to see the difference.
Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!
P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.
