I love setting goals. Many years ago, I was introduced to Sarra Cannon’s HB90 goal setting system with the worksheets, calendars, Kanban boards – the whole nine yards. Finally, setting achievable goals and having a system to track progress made sense! I was ready to conquer the world! Or at least my little corner of it.
If you’re not familiar with Sarra’s dreamchild, you can find all sorts of info on her website and on YouTube. (I'm in no way affiliated with Sarra. I just really appreciate all that she's shared and taught over the years.)
In a very tiny nutshell, you focus on one quarter of the year at a time and figure out how many actual writing days you anticipate having in those three months, being super realistic. You may think you have 90 days to write, but there’s more to life than writing, like appointments, family members who need attention or care, social commitments, etc. Subtract that time from the 90. And then there are the unforeseen things like not feeling well, or the water heater springs a leak, or the cat runs away. You get the idea. Subtract a few more days for that stuff. I take weekends off, so I automatically lose eight to ten days. Now, given that you know how many words you can write in a day (and if you don’t know you need to find out), and you now know how many actual writing days you have, you can do the simple math to see how many words you can write in a quarter. Or, if you’re editing, you can work backward.
I have a deadline. My editor is expecting a polished manuscript by September 30th. My extremely rough draft is 70,000 words. Between now and then I have a week-long camping trip scheduled, a long weekend to celebrate our anniversary, two doctor appointments with my mum in another town so each one requires a full day, and I can count on at least three days of downtime due to a migraine. (Insert sound of old-fashioned adding machine.) Leaving me with 33 days for editing at a rate of 8 pages a day. Definitely doable, even factoring in the scene or three *cough* that need fleshing out.
You gotta love it, right? So where is the hate ‘em as referenced in the title of this post? Well, I’ll tell you. Because I had the second quarter of the year laid out in a similar fashion and then my mum got ill, requiring me to live with her for weeks at a time and provide hands-on nursing care. Also, we both got Covid. (Mild cases, but still!) My muse left the building. I got some writing admin done, promo and such, but anything creative was a lost cause. Mum is recovering nicely, thank goodness, (Thank you Dr. L and Dr. C!) and I’m back home. Nothing I had planned to accomplish in Q2 got done. I look at my planner and feel like I’m too behind schedule to ever catch up. And that’s probably true. But there’s lots of time left in the year. I recalibrated and know that I can finish Q3 strong. Then I’ll set some goals for Q4, count the days and do the math. And I’ll add in a few extra days of non-writing just to be safe.
