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.
The New Year’s goal ritual looks worse every year. It feels like progress and makes a nice list, and it lets writers put off the actual work for another eleven months while believing they’ve committed to it.
What 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 113+ published books, 54+ ghostwriting projects, and eight novels currently in progress.
My long goal is to write one novel in each of 20 genres. I’ve got maybe 20 years left. That brings me to my mid-80s, so I asked myself what I want to accomplish in those years. I could just cruise. I have fun with the writing, and my clients are low-maintenance and low-stress because I deliver.
Why do daily writing goals work best?
Every day starts with a priority list. Clients come first. Always. If a client needs something, that’s the first thing I work on. Presales activities come second, because without new business in the pipeline, the client work eventually dries up. Personal projects come third. That means my own novels and books get worked on after the revenue-generating work is handled. For more, see writing burnout and overcoming challenges when writing a book.
In 2024 my cadence was about 500 words per client every workday. The client reviewed each chunk the next day, in comments instead of edits. That doesn’t sound like much, and it still adds up to about 10,000 words a month. Reviewing 500 words at a time surfaces problems before I’ve written much more, and nobody has to read a whole chapter at once. I never ended up scrambling to finish a chapter in the last two days of the month.
Annual goals feel productive when you write them down.Share on X
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 is 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. 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.
What Is the Modified Pomodoro for Writers?
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 think the 25-minute timer is one of the worst productivity ideas ever handed to writers. It was built for chopping through small tasks, and forcing a novelist to break concentration every 25 minutes guarantees the deep work never starts.
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 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, more real output than most writers get in eight hours of scattered effort interrupted by email, social media, and context switching.
Do SMART goals work for writers?
I use SMART goals heavily. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. The structure 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 are 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 makes them practical, but it’s also what makes them uncomfortable. Concrete goals can visibly fail, 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, and I’d call it delusional. Delusional goals produce zero output because the brain recognizes the impossibility and disengages. It does real damage, because the failure usually gets blamed on their discipline when the plan was what broke.
Why Do Annual Writing Goals Fail?
Because a year is too far away to feel urgent, so the work slides until the deadline is impossible.
From the podcast
Gerry Mecca lets his kids stop things, with one condition, on Leaders and Their Stories:
If they start something, they’re allowed to stop it, but not in the middle of it.An annual goal is all middle. There’s no natural place to stop honorably, so it gets abandoned instead of finished.
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.
Every December I hear writers talk about the year as if it happened to them, when the plan they wrote in January never gave them a chance.
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 instead of adapted.
The alternative is 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.
What’s the point of setting writing goals?
Goal setting for writers is about structure. Writing is a production activity, and you either produce work or you don’t.
Daily goals, task deadlines, 90-minute focus blocks and SMART targets are tools for producing more work more consistently. I think most writers who never finish are victims of bad planning advice, and I’d love to see the annual resolution retired in favor of a list that tells you what to write today.
