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I set annual goals every year. They fall by the wayside every year. By March, the ambitious plan I created in January has been overtaken by client deadlines, unexpected projects, and the reality that a year is too long a timeframe to maintain focus on anything specific. Annual goals feel productive when you write them down. They rarely produce results.
What actually works for me are daily goals and task-based goals. Daily goals keep me moving. Task-based goals keep me finishing things. The combination has produced over 120 published books, 53 ghostwriting projects, and eight novels currently in progress. Here’s the system.
Daily Goals: The Only Ones That Consistently Work
Every day starts with a priority list. For more, see writing burnout. Clients come first. Always. If a client needs something, that’s the first thing I work on. For more, see overcoming challenges when writing a book. Presales activities come second, because without new business in the pipeline, the client work eventually dries up. Personal projects come third, which means my own novels and books get worked on after the revenue-generating work is handled.
I mix exercise and diet goals into the daily structure too. Writing is sedentary work, and ignoring your body while grinding through manuscripts is a fast path to health problems. The daily goal isn’t just about output. It’s about maintaining a sustainable rhythm across all the things that matter.
The daily list works because it’s immediate. There’s no room for the goal to become abstract or distant. Either I did the things on the list today or I didn’t. That clarity eliminates the vagueness that kills annual goals.
Task Goals: The Most Effective Approach
The goals that produce the most results for me are task-based: “Write three books by the end of the month.” Not “write more this year.” Not “improve my productivity.” A specific deliverable with a specific deadline. The task is concrete, the timeframe is short enough to maintain urgency, and the finish line is clear.
Task goals work because they’re about completion, not aspiration. An annual goal to “write a novel” gives you twelve months to procrastinate. A task goal to “finish the first draft by March 15” gives you a deadline that creates real pressure. That pressure is productive. It forces decisions about what matters and what doesn’t, what gets your time and what gets cut.
I stack task goals across projects. One ghostwriting manuscript due this month, two chapters of Peacekeeper this week, a batch of articles by Friday. The stacking keeps momentum going because finishing one thing creates energy for the next. Completion is motivating in a way that “making progress” never is.
The Modified Pomodoro
The standard Pomodoro technique uses 25-minute work intervals with 5-minute breaks. That doesn’t work for writing. Twenty-five minutes isn’t enough time to get into deep focus on a manuscript. By the time I’ve found my place, reread the last few paragraphs, and gotten back into the flow, the timer goes off.
I use 90-minute work blocks with 30-minute breaks. Ninety minutes is long enough to produce real output on a chapter, an article, or a client deliverable. The 30-minute break is long enough to actually reset, not just glance at your phone and pretend you rested. I use the breaks for exercise, food, or anything that isn’t staring at a screen.
This rhythm works for the kind of sustained concentration that writing demands. Three 90-minute blocks in a day produces four and a half hours of focused writing, which is more real output than most writers get in eight hours of scattered effort interrupted by email, social media, and context switching.
SMART Goals: Useful but Hard for Most People
I use SMART goals heavily. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. The framework is powerful when applied correctly. The problem is that SMART goals don’t fit the way most people naturally think.
Most people set goals like “get in better shape” or “write more.” Those aren’t goals. They’re wishes. A SMART version would be “write 1,000 words per day on Peacekeeper for the next 30 days” or “complete the Bonilla manuscript by February 28.” The specificity is what makes them actionable, but it’s also what makes them uncomfortable. Specific goals can fail specifically, and most people would rather have a vague aspiration they can’t technically fail at than a concrete target they might miss.
The measurable component is where most goals fall apart. If you can’t answer “did I achieve this or not” with a yes or no, the goal isn’t measurable. “Improve my writing” is unmeasurable. “Publish four articles this month” is measurable. The difference seems obvious on paper but most people resist making their goals this concrete because it removes the comfortable ambiguity.
Achievable is the constraint most people ignore. Setting a goal to write five novels in three months sounds ambitious. It’s not ambitious. It’s delusional, and delusional goals produce zero output because the brain recognizes the impossibility and disengages. Achievable goals create forward motion. Impossible goals create paralysis.
Why Annual Goals Fail
Annual goals fail because a year is too long. The gap between “I want to do this” and “I need to do this right now” is so large that urgency never develops. You always have more time. Until you don’t, and then it’s December and nothing happened.
Annual goals also fail because life changes. The goal you set in January is based on circumstances that may not exist by April. New clients appear, projects shift, priorities change. A rigid annual plan can’t accommodate that reality, so it gets abandoned rather than adapted.
The alternative isn’t to stop planning. It’s to plan in shorter cycles. Daily goals for execution. Weekly task goals for deliverables. Monthly targets for larger projects. Quarterly reviews to assess whether the direction still makes sense. This layered approach keeps you productive without locking you into a plan that stopped being relevant months ago.
The Real Point
Goal setting for writers isn’t about motivation or inspiration. It’s about structure. Writing is a production activity. You either produce work or you don’t. Daily goals, task-based deadlines, 90-minute focus blocks, and SMART frameworks are all just tools for producing more work more consistently. The writers who produce the most aren’t the most talented or the most inspired. They’re the ones with systems that force output regardless of how they feel on any given day.