How to Meet Our Goals in 2014

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Happy 2014 everyone!

And, like everyone else on the internet, I have advice for making it a better year.  :)  I actually had a different post I planned on running today, but since my blog reader was so chock-full of writerly advice for the next year, I felt I needed to run a post as an antidote.  When I read too many lofty goals, it both exhausts me and makes me feel as if I’m not doing enough.

So here are my 3 tips for meeting goals in 2014:

Think to-do list, not resolution.  We hear this type of advice all the time and the reason we hear it is because it usually works.  So, instead of saying write and revise a book in 2014, it would be better to say write for 15 minutes  5 days out of each week in February or ‘by the end of January,  create a list all my character names, traits, and motivations.’  Or, by the end of the month, I want to have a plan for the next three chapters in my book. Or even today, I’ll look for and squeeze in 10 minutes of extra writing time.  How specific can you make it?  How many steps can you turn ‘write a book’ into—keeping the steps actionable and small enough to knock out in the time allotted?

How small can you make your daily goal and still get where you want to be?  That’s the trick to everything in life, I think.  My goals are frighteningly small and I’m always a little uncomfortable when I share them.  But my output is pretty big…because I’m consistent with my small goals.  I know I can meet a writing goal of 3 or 3.5 pages a day. For me, that’s 30 minutes in the morning and another 20 in the afternoon.  My goal, in the past, has been as low as 15 minutes a day when I had an active toddler in the house (this usually netted me a page).  If you write a page a day for 2014 on one project…well, you’ll have a heck of a long book that will actually need to be edited down.  But isn’t that better than not having a book to revise, at all?

This goes for everything in life.  How low can you set the bar and still get what you want? I know that sounds awful, but for me, that’s how I achieve—I hit all my goals and that motivates me to keep hitting goals.  And if I hit my goal and keep going and write more…that doesn’t mean I don’t write the next day.  The next day I meet my very modest goal again.  With modern life—we’ve just got to be realistic about our time.

I hear folks saying they want to lose twenty-five pounds and want to go to the gym every day.  This makes me wince because how many people can live up to that?  And what happens when they have a set-back and miss their goal five or six times? Isn’t it so much better to have a ridiculously low goal and make it a no-brainer and meet it?  So, instead of losing twenty-five pounds, couldn’t they say by the end of the week, substitute water for Diet Coke or take the stairs at work instead of the elevator three times this week ?

Track your accomplishments and post them.

I mentioned this trick in this post, but it really does help me.  I read an article this past year about the psychology of to-do lists and they said they work better if you keep the crossed-off bits on your list so that you can see how far you’ve come.

In that spirit, I think tracking our accomplishments is really helpful.  It helps us see that we’re not just treading water—that we’re making inroads. I put some of my accomplishments on my website’s news page, which makes for a more public way of motivating myself.

How do you stay on track with your projects each year?  And Happy 2014.

Image: MorgueFile: Efi