Posts tagged Goals
Get Organized: Evaluating Your Progress
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The final step in organizing your writing effort is periodic evaluation—measuring your progress and making adjustments. You may choose to evaluate monthly, quarterly, or annually. Just resolve to do it.
Review your intentions: Take a look at the goals you set for yourself. Did you accomplish any of the short-term goals? How are you progressing on the long-term goals? The more specific your goals, the easier it is to measure success. As an example, if you stated that you wanted to submit one article per week, this goal is easily measured by counting your submissions. At the monthly mark, you should have sent out four submissions. If you’re behind on your quota, you can make it up before the next evaluation date. Vague goals like “submitting as many articles as I can” aren’t easily measured. You can excuse a low submission count by citing distractions or unforeseen circumstances. (more…)
Get Organized: Time Management
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“Write for at least one hour every day.” I heard this a lot at my first few writers’ conferences. Of course, writers will write every day. And, why only one hour? Shouldn’t you write all the time? The fact is, writing your content is not all you have to do. Besides knowing the writing craft, you must spend time studying the markets, scoping out the “competition,” researching subject matter, meeting other writers and editors, and keeping your efforts organized.
If you devote full-time to your writing career, you may spend as much as an hour each day doing these additional writer jobs. If you consider yourself part-time, organize your time, either daily or weekly, to perform each of the following functions. (more…)
Get Organized: Intentions
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Getting organized involves more than collecting your tools and managing your time. All of that effort is wasted if you don’t have clear intentions for your work. Ask yourself these questions as you plan your writing career
What are your goals for your writing? Organizations and individuals spend a lot of time developing goals and objectives to make their work more effective. A writer should have the same concern. If you don’t know what your goal is, you have no way to measure success.
Do you want to publish a book? The steps to publication for a published writer will be different from those of an unpublished writer. As you set your goals, be sure they are realistic. Miracles do happen, but it usually takes years, even decades, to see that first book in print. Attend conferences and learn what it takes to reach your goal. Then, set your sub-goals with your time constraints in mind.
For the Christian writer—do the goals you’ve set coincide with what God wants for your writing? The best resource on this topic is a book that is out of print. Published in 1983 and 1988, Mark Porter’s The Time of Your Life: How to Accomplish All That God Wants You to Do is not specifically for writers, but I highly recommend it. Porter outlines a time management method for Christians that includes several chapters on goal-setting. See my review of this book here. (more…)
