When I was a Mormon missionary in Italy, one of the things they tried hard to teach us was to set goals and to follow up with ourselves to gauge our progress in meeting them.  For example, I remember setting a goal for how many people I would try to speak with in a given week.  I was never a great goal setter—the parameters for calculating a number always seemed rather cold and removed from my purpose to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ.  I gave the idea lip service, but to me, it seemed that particular idea was culled more from Steven Covey’s business practices than from any divine notion of self/civilization improvement.  Goal setting quickly fell by the wayside when I shucked the name-tag.

So this is where I repent.  🙂

I wrote some time ago about how the novel was progressing after Tiptoe’s surgery—to sum up, “Not very well.”  I tried a number of software tools and tricky techniques for getting words on the page—but nothing worked consistently.  Add to that exhaustion, stress, daily grind, etc…  It was a pretty frustrating situation.  Finally, I did what I was taught to do back in Italy with goal-setting:

1)      Evaluate capacity.  I type around 60 words per minute, but since I’m a discovery writer (who uses a plot outline as a roadmap), lots of what I write doesn’t make the draft.  I estimated I could probably lay down about 500 words per hour on my very best days.

2)      Evaluate circumstance.  There’s no getting around it: I’ve got a big family.  I need them a lot more than I need to write.  The time that I have for writing is constrained by the amount of time I spend enjoying my wife and kids.  I *do* have time to write though—about an hour on my morning commute, and about an hour and a half on the way home.  So, two hours per day that I can dedicate to writing. 

3)      Set a realistic goal.  In all likelihood, I cannot write 1000 words per day.  Not yet.  I’m working on it.  In the meantime, I settled for 250 words per day.  That’s about a page.

4)      Construct a mechanism for gauging success.  In this case, the mechanism is turning on MS Word’s ‘Word Count’ toolbar, and keeping track of my daily progress with an MS Excel spreadsheet.  I’ve got five columns:

a.       Date: Self-explanatory

b.      Start Count: Tracks the document’s total word count at the start of my writing session.

c.       End Count:  Tracks the document’s total word count at the end of my writing session.

d.      Goal: Start Count + 250

e.       Written: End Count – Start Count

f.       Some simple calculations allow me to enter only the document’s end count to make the other fields auto-populate.  Keeping a spreadsheet like this allows me to see how far I’ve come and gauge how much I have to do per day to reach each day’s end goal. 

5)      Reward success.  Nothing really to this one; it’s really satisfying to reach 250 words in an hour, and keep writing.  For now the satisfaction is all the reward I need.

It’s a little artificial—but it’s working.  My brain is freed from having to worry about all the blank pages left in the novel.  It only has to worry about filling up 250 words.  The next step is to increase the goal, and stretch to reach it.