Agent in Your Pocket: Writing Goals You’ll Keep

There’s a predictable moment a few weeks into any fresh start when your intentions meet your actual life.  

Picture this: In a fit of enthusiasm, you decided that this season was going to be the one you write every day. Or read a short story every week. Post on social media. Be a good literary citizen. And then work late runs late. Someone gets sick. The dog chews your shoes. By the time you sit down to work on your goal, your brain feels like wet laundry. 

So you avoid the goal and instead, tell yourself you’re not good at following through. 

The thing is, that’s simply not true. You just don’t have a plan. Instead, you have a desire and a deadline and a pile of good intentions, but no route to get you where you want to be. Without a route, real life will always win.  

So before you set goals, name what you’re willing to do to follow that route. 

If a goal is where you want to end up, then a route is what you’re willing to do to get there. So that means you need to start with the big goal of the season. Then, reverse-plan it into actions that you can repeat on any given day when the day absolutely does not unfold the way you expect it will.  

The first question you need to answer is this: If I’m working toward achieving this goal, what needs to happen every week?  

Then break it down further: 

Let’s look at some examples. 

If your goal is to get serious about querying, then your route might look like this:  

Say your big goal for the season is to finish the draft of your novel. The same framework will apply and your route might look something like this. 

In both of these examples, the plan is what makes the follow-through possible. You decided on your route and it became non-negotiable. Now you’re no longer asking yourself what you should do to work toward your goal. You already have the answer to that question. Instead, you’re simply executing a choice you made when you decided to work toward the goal. 

Here’s the other thing to keep in mind. These routes don’t need to be impressive but they have to be repeatable. That means the route has to be one you can walk on a normal week instead of a perfect plan that you follow only when you’re inspired. 

So set your goal. Then pick the path that will reliably get you where you want to be. Make it easy on yourself so that the path will survive your real life but concrete enough to make advancements on your goal. 

That’s how you become someone who follows through, even when your brain feels like wet laundry.