Smart Goals

by Leigh Perry / Toni L.P. Kelner

I have a love/hate relationship with New Year's. I love the sense of making a fresh start, but I'm not crazy about the feeling that I have to get back to work, make my deadlines, clean my house, catch up on bills, clear out my closets, sort my drawers, get more exercise... In short, all those things that have shown up as New Year's Resolutions at one time or another. Honestly, my resolutions almost never work.

Surely I'm not alone in this. Compare the number of exercise bikes sold to the number left out on the curb come spring, the self-help books that end up at the used bookstores, and the houses that still maintain a certain dustiness all year 'round. Okay, maybe it's just me.

At any rate,I want to tackle the issue head-on in 2014, and I have a new resolution:

I'm not making any New Year's Resolutions!

That doesn't mean I'm not going to try to make my deadlines, clean my house, catch up on bills, and so on. It just means that this year, instead of making resolutions, I'm setting goals. That may not sound any different, but it is if I make SMART goals.

There's actually been a fair amount of research into setting good goals--and by "good" I mean goals that have a  better success rate than my resolutions. The trick is to make smart goals. Or rather, S.M.A.R.T. goals. A good goal is:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Risky
Time-based

So let's just take one of the areas I need to work on: my writing. (Housecleaning is much lower down on the list.)

Is it specific?
"I want to write a novel" is specific, as is, "I want to write a short story" or "I want to write an essay." But "I want to write" is not, nor is it  helpful. So I'll go with, "I want to write a novel in 2014." In fact, I'll make it more specific than that: "I want to finish the third Family Skeleton by Dec. 31."

Is it measurable?
While a novel is technically measureable, it may not help as a goal because it's fuzzy. How many chapters, pages, words, or scenes go into a novel? So it's better to break that down into something more measureable. Some people count the hours in the chair--they write 4 hours a day. Of course, some days you can write 1 page in 4 hours, and other days you might get 20 pages in that same time. Chapters might work, but even a chapter is pretty variable--some chapters are longer than others. Ditto pages or scenes. I'm going with my favorite: word count. This would have been harder in the days before word processors, needless to say.

Is it attainable?
The amount a person writes varies tremendously from writer to writer. Some people sweat over 500 words at a sitting while others can do 5,000 words and still have time to take in a movie. When I started writing, 600 words was about as much as I could do, but as time went on, I stretched to 800 then to 1,000.

Is it risky?
I know it sounds counterintuitive to set a risky goal, but you have to take human nature into account. Or if your husband is a research psychologist, you take the Yerkes-Dodson Law into account. I won't go into the experiments used to prove it--which involve monkeys, sticks, and bananas--but it boils down to this: people achieve more if they're facing a moderate amount of risk. If something is too easy, you won't bother to try--if it's too hard, you won't bother to try. But if you have a decent chance of success, then you'll try that much harder. Again, one writer's risk might be too hard or too easy for another--you have to pick one that fits your speed. For me, 1000 words is currently a bit too easy. 3000 words is  too hard. 1,500 to 2,000 is about right.

Is it time-based?
Setting time-based goals has been implied in the other sections, but I want to emphasize its importance. When I had a day job, I wrote four days a week. This was because I knew that some days I'd be too tired or sick or going to movies or whatever. When I went fulltime, I switched to five days a week, and when I'm tight on a deadline six or seven. So whether your goal is to write every day, every Saturday, every 3rd of the month--just pick something that is realistic for you. Because who wants to set S.M.A.R. goals? 

Now that I have preached my piece, I will admit to messing up every single one of these aspects in previous years. Many of them in 2013. I have hand-written resolutions that say, "I want to write more this year" and I've set word counts that were so easy that played Bejeweled Blitz all day and forgot to write or so hard that I shivered in my bed rather than even turn on the computer. I will probably blow them again.

That's okay. Embarrassing, but okay. Not all goals are met. Life happens.

But 2014 is a new year, and as Anne of Green Gables would say, it doesn't have any mistakes in it. So I've got fresh goals to set.

Here's hoping you set--and meet--many SMART goals of your own!



NOTE: Writing this blog post is my first achieved goal of 2014.

Comments

[Mary]

I like this SMART idea, Toni. The risk part is a surprise. We humans are weird animals. :)

But the risk - this may be why NaNoWriMo and other writer dares or competitions work so well. They have an element of flinging yourself into danger. I need to be more of a thrill-seeker and write like a bungee jumper! :)

[Charlaine Harris]

Good plan, Toni. And I think it's smart to count the achieved ones, and let the others quietly molder away in a forgotten room.