Writing goals update: April 2021

Setting writing goals and reminders on my phone to encourage me to write more seems to be going OK so far, though I’m definitely being too ambitious.

Some of my goals are to write a blog every two weeks and do a writing exercise of some sort every other day, plus one piece of paid freelance work per month, whether that’s writing or editing. If any of the writing tasks fall on the same day as the writing exercise, I’ve decided that writing task counts as writing exercise for that day as it would be too much between my full-time job and family commitments to do both.

There isn’t a set amount of time I’ve given myself for the unpaid writing tasks, which I think is a good bit of flexibility as I may be able to write for an hour one day and only 10 or 15 minutes the next. I also don’t expect myself to complete a writing task in a single evening of writing. For example, one writing exercise was to write a quintain, which I did over several evenings rather than in a single night, because that’s not realistic for me.

I don’t always meet my goals, but I am writing more regularly than when I didn’t have any goals or reminders set, so that’s a win, but I also often ignore my writing reminders on my phone and then need to play catch-up later. That build-up is starting to make what’s meant to be “fun writing” feel more like my day job, so it’s clear that I need to scale back a bit.

I also haven’t tried to do much in terms of paid freelancing lately; I’ll either need to devote more time to that, or cut back how much I plan to do.

What I’ve learned from/about my writing goals so far

1)   Just setting goals/reminders is helpful to force you to write regularly, even if you don’t always meet those goals or complete the tasks the day you plan to.

2)   I need to set fewer goals for myself as I’m starting to find it hard to keep track of them all. (I have more than the ones listed in this blog).

3)   My goals are too ambitious and need to be adjusted so that I can build my confidence and not feel like a failure.

Adjustments for the future

I’m going to change up my reminders slightly to do a writing exercise at least every three days instead of every other day and I’m leaning toward changing my freelancing goal to do one paid project every two months as even doing one per month has been difficult. I’d also planned to do an online class once per month to learn how to design my website, but that seems unrealistic as well. Since I haven’t even tried to meet that goal yet, I’ll leave it for now, but it probably needs to be changed too.

It’s important to be flexible and acknowledge when my goals are too ambitious. If I ignore my reminders for a day, but am able to complete the writing tasks the next day, it doesn’t mean that goal is unrealistic, but if I’ve been putting them off for longer than a day or two, it clearly means I’m asking too much of myself.

I’m doing pretty well with the small goals, but the big ones are just too big right now. So I don’t feel terrible paring those down or even putting them on hold for a bit.

I’m meeting my overall goal of just getting back to doing my own writing again, so that is something.