Define Your Writing Goals for 2024: What Do You Want to Achieve?

I gave up making resolutions years ago, but I firmly believe in the power of goal setting, and in this case, setting your writing goals for the new year. Resolutions tend to get forgotten or dropped within weeks. Goals, however, if made correctly, can carry you through the year. What do you want to achieve in 2024?

A spiral notebook with the words New Year's Resolutions across the top, followed by 1. Quit Making New Year's Resolutions. Because of course, writing goals are better than resolutions.

Prep Work

Start by assessing where you are now. How far did you get with your writing goals this year? Were the goals you set realistic? Manageable? Or did you set yourself up for failure by overloading your schedule? Make note of what worked and what did not. Write things down, in a notebook or your planner or the app of your choosing. Just make sure you track your progress somewhere where it’s easy to go back and review over the year.

Next, think about where you’d like to go. For this stage, think big. Don’t limit yourself to what you want to achieve in a year, but envision a career path and the things you’d like to do along the way. It might stretch five years out or even ten. If you’ve done this before, revisit your previous ambitions and see if you still feel the same. Goals and dreams can alter as you move through your career. Don’t hold yourself to a plan simply because you drew it up three years ago. Let yourself be flexible.

Setting Your Writing Goals

Once you have the big picture down, consider what it will take to get from where you are currently to the next point on your career path. Focus on steps that are within your control. For instance, you night want to get an agent, but the timeline for that isn’t entirely up to you. Instead, making the goal to work toward getting an agent. Set a timeline based on the steps you will take: writing a query letter, making a submissions list, sending out queries in batches.

Even though we are looking at New Year’s goal setting, don’t tie yourself to the one-year schedule. If your goal is to write the first draft of a new project, you might take a year, but you might take more or less than that. Base your writing goals on your own work habits. Maybe you write daily, in which case a goal of 1,000 words per day might get you a draft by the start of April. 500 words per day result in a six-month draft. But if you’re a weekend writer, those same drafts might take a year or two. Don’t set your writing goals according to someone else’s idea of how you should work (unless, of course, you’re working to deadlines).

A dark green typewriter with a sheet of paper fed into it. A single word typed on the paper reads Goals.

I find setting a variety of goals really helpful. One major project might stretch for the year, while smaller ones can be completed in a month or a quarter, giving me a sense of accomplishment that motivates me through the year. Not every goal should start January 1st, either. You might have additional stages that kick in come spring or summer. It could be the next stage of an earlier goal, research you plan to focus on during a vacation, or something completely new.

Breaking Down Your Goals

Consider all the steps you need to take to achieve your goals. Break the process down as far as you can go. It’s not enough to say writing 500 words every day will net a draft in six months. When do you plan to write? Where? If you miss a day, how do you plan to make up those words? Will you write on holidays?

Next, determine what will prompt you to work toward your goal. Do you need an accountability buddy? To set calendar reminders? Are you the type of person who works well if there’s a reward? Maybe you’ll treat yourself to writing at your favorite café once a week or celebrate with dinner out once you’ve finally hit send on that first batch of query letters.

Tracking Your Progress

Be sure to check in on your progress with your goals as the year goes by. Every quarter, or even monthly, if you have fast-moving goals, take a moment to review your plan. How are you doing? Do you need to change anything to make your plan work more smoothly? Have circumstances cropped up that require you to reconsider the systems you’ve set in place? Your writing goals are yours; only you can determine if they’re still what you want. Checking in gives you the chance to make sure you’re heading down the correct path.

Take the next few days to consider what you want your writing life to look like in 2024. And of course these tips for goal planning work for goals of all kinds. If you enjoy reading self-help books, I’m a fan of The 12-Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lexington, mostly for the way they discuss breaking down goals and using smaller chunks of time to maintain momentum during the year. There’s also a version geared toward writing goals: The 12-Week Year for Writers by A. Trevor Thrall, Brian P. Moran, and Michael Lexington. I haven’t had a chance to read the latter yet, but it’s on my TBR and I’m interested to see how they adapt the concept for writing projects.

Have you already started setting writing goals for 2024? Are you excited for the new year?

Goal Setting for the New Year Ahead

Most years, I start discussing goals for the new year a few weeks before the end of December. I advocate for taking time to review the year you’ve just gone through to see where things stand. Have you written as much as you’d like? Did you make more progress or less than you wanted? What needs finishing? Improving? Where do you need to just keep up the good work? You need to know where you stand to figure out where you want to go.

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

As with all things, 2020 proves the exception. I still think it’s important to take stock of your current writing progress, but looking back over the year is a personal decision. For many of you, it’s better to just plow forward because it’s been a year of frustration and lost focus. If you’ve achieved your goals for 2020, kudos! But many, many people will have fallen short. Don’t beat yourself up. We’re living through extraordinary times and it’s important to be kind to yourself.

So what does this mean for 2021? New years deserve new goals. I’m not a huge resolution person, as many of you might know. I feel like the expectations are huge and the follow-through unlikely. Goals come at any part of the year, however, and you can always add to them or adjust them based on circumstances. Consider them guideposts for your writing plans.

Setting Goals for 2021

By all means, take a day or so to think about what goals you’d like to set for your writing next year. Make them measurable, and things you can control, especially after this past year. Don’t say “I’m going to get an agent,” because you only control part of that scenario. Instead, plan to complete the steps required. A series of goals related to finding an agent might include:

  • Finish writing manuscript.
  • Revise/edit manuscript until it’s ready to submit.
  • Research agents and agencies (to see who reps your type of writing and who might be interested in your work).
  • Write a synopsis and a query letter.

Those are all manageable steps, things you can check off your to-do list and call completed. Finishing a manuscript takes far more time than writing a query letter, so it would be a larger goal. You might research agents in small bursts over several weeks. Revising requires more time, especially if you plan to let a manuscript sit until you have a fresh perspective.

Wherever you are in your writing journey, from newbie to pro, I recommend setting a few goals of different sizes and then estimating when you might reasonably finish them. A big goal might take all year, but smaller ones might be complete in a couple of months or so. Set them up on a calendar, and stagger some of those smaller projects. For instance, you might have a major goal that runs until December, as well as a medium one that runs January to June and a smaller one from July to September.

Making Allowances for Life

2020 won’t be the only year to mess with you careful planning. Consider your typical year and allow more time during periods where you get busy or have other responsibilities, whether to a day job or family. If the December holidays are usually packed with chores and family gatherings, you might aim to finish a larger goal in mid-November so you don’t feel the pinch for time. But keep in mind, you can also tweak your timelines based on your life and what comes up. Stay flexible. They’re your goals; unless you have a publishing deadline or something similar tied to your goal, you’re the only one who can say when and how it needs to be done. Don’t let yourself off the hook for every tiny detour, but don’t beat yourself up if you honestly need to alter your original schedule.

Finally, remember to write your goals down somewhere you’ll see them often, and keep them fresh in your mind. Review them at the end of each month or quarter to assess your progress and see what needs to be updated. If you’re ahead of schedule, you might wish to add a new goal at some point during the year. And always find at least some little way of congratulating or rewarding yourself when you hit one of those goals. Achievement should be celebrated.

The Year in Review: Time to Assess 2017

Before you start setting goals for next year, it’s important to assess 2017 and see where you stand. This has been a difficult year for many, and that can make it frustrating to consider your progress — or lack of it. But not every year will shine. Some years bring major challenges. Here are some tips for considering this year in an honest fashion, and for gearing up for 2018. So grab your list of goals for 2017 if you made one, and some paper, and get ready to analyze.

desk-with-laptop

Considering Your Goals for the Year

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know I encourage writers to set goals every year. So if you joined me for that process, or did it on your own, you should have some sort of list or spreadsheet of what you wanted to achieve. This will help you assess 2017. Take a look at what you wanted to accomplish, step by step, and see how you did. Be honest, but don’t be overly critical if you fell short. Just note what went well, what you pulled off, and where you made progress. Congratulate yourself for the things that got done. Then look at what you didn’t finish, or maybe gave up on. Maybe there were projects you never even started. Ask yourself why some goals went better than others.

  • Were some goals easier?
  • Were you more interested in completing certain things?
  • Did you get frustrated by roadblocks or lack of progress and slowly give up on any of your goals?
  • Did you underestimate the time you needed for something?
  • How did life get in your way?
  • Did any of your goals just become less important as the year progressed?

The key here is to think about where you got in own your way, and where other factors came into play. That way you know where to focus your attention in the future. Don’t beat yourself up for any failures; they’re learning opportunities.

Considering How to Make Goals More Manageable in the Future

We fall short on goals for many reasons, only some of which you can control. Understand that there will always be things that happen that require you to shift your focus elsewhere or set projects aside. But you can take your own habits and tendencies into account, giving yourself an advantage. A few tips:

  • Make sure you’ve broken your goals up into sufficiently small parts.
  • Build a little extra time into goals that you know depend on other people’s cooperation.
  • Consider if a goal is time sensitive, or just something you decided you wanted to do; deadlines tend to motivate.
  • Keep your list of goals to a manageable number, and consider the level of difficulty for each one; one big goal and a few small ones or several medium-sized goals can help balance your efforts.

Once you’ve had time to assess 2017 and all you’ve accomplished, you’ll be ready to start looking forward to your goals for next year. Don’t jump right into it. Take a few days to let ideas percolate. Think about where you want to go with your writing, but also with other areas of your life.

Consider your day job, your family and relationships, your health, finances, and community responsibilites. 2017 made a lot of people sit up and take more notice of politics, so that might affect your plans for next year. Maybe you want to travel more, or go back to school. Take it all into consideration and even make a few notes while you’re brainstorming. Then next week, we’ll talk about setting goals for 2018.

 

 

Writing Goals: Planning for 2017

The new year is on the horizon, and at this point many people start to draft their new year’s resolutions. If you’ve been around this blog for a while, you know I’m not really a fan of the idea of resolutions. The concept brings to mind vague promises to get thin or save more money, usually broken by sometime in February. What I am a huge fan of, however, is goal setting.

What’s the difference between a resolution and a goal, you ask? For me, making goals is all about setting concrete, measurable achievements to aim for in a specific amount of time, complete with a list of tasks needed to hit them as planned. While I don’t always manage to make all my goals, I find this approach to be much more successful overall than the resolution route.

Begin by aiming high. I like to dream up one or two big things I’d like to accomplish over the course of the year. Things that will take all the way until December. These can often be broken down into smaller, mid-point goals that keep me on track. For instance, if the goal is to sign six new clients, I’d aim for one every 6-8 weeks.

Next, outline some smaller goals. Everyone loves a sense of achievement. It encourages you to keep striving. So think of goals that won’t take anywhere near an entire year to accomplish. Maybe you have a few 30-day goals, and three or four that might take 4-6 months.

Determine what each goal will require of you. For each goal, you need a game plan — a list of tasks you need to perform in order to achieve your end result. These might include doing something entirely new, stepping up your productivity in a certain area, etc. If I go back to my hypothetical goal of six new clients, I might dedicate more time to reading submissions, spend time seeking out likely sounding authors by reading shared work on various online forums, agree to judge some writing contests, etc. Some of the tasks on your list might end up small goals you can check off — like researching a topic for a book, purchasing the domain name for a new author website, or making a list of agents to submit to.

Design your Goal Calendar for 2017. Take a look at your schedule and figure out when you want to tackle the short-term goals from your list. Keep in mind that some small goals should get pushed until later in the year. Don’t try to tackle everything at once on January 1st; that just leads to frustration and fatigue. Consider any travel plans you might have or big work projects that you anticipate keeping you especially busy, and work around them. And remember that your long-term goals will also be taking place across the span of the entire year. If you’ve broken them down into smaller chunks, place those goal due dates on your calendar as well.

There you go! You’ve got your plan for the year and a road map for how to achieve your goals. Of course, it’s not quite as easy as that. You’re going to want to put a little time into planning what your goals are. Consider what you’ve achieved this year, where you’ve hit your targets and where you’ve fallen short, and how that might reflect on your choices for 2017. Plus, remember that all of this is yours to design and to alter as you go. The best plans are flexible. Sure, you should strive to achieve the things you’re aiming for, but be honest with yourself and allow those goals to shift and develop as the year progresses, if circumstances call for it. Life happens, and that means what you want to achieve right now might not be what you want to work toward come September.

Whatever your goals — for writing, for improving your health, for spending more time with your family — this approach will allow you to create a concrete plan for achieving them without becoming overwhelmed or losing sight of your targets. Happy planning, and best of luck for a wonderfully productive 2017.