Writing Goals and Weekly Goals

 

Image Credit: Startup Stock Photos on Pexels

At the beginning of the year, most writers come up with one or more writing goals for them to accomplish in the new year. I’m one of those writers, but sometimes, I will create a weekly goal for myself as well. These weekly goals don’t happen every week; just when there is a reason for them to happen.

 

Like this week. I usually have just ONE weekly goal, but this week, I had two.

 

I have a short story that I wrote some time ago which I wanted to submit to an anthology call. That deadline was coming up, so I knew I needed to spend some time revising that short story so that I could submit it in time. I decided that my weekly goal for this week would be to complete revisions on this short story.

 

I started working on the revisions for this short story on Monday and, because I worked on it every day, I finished the revisions on Friday. I was happy with this new draft of the story, so I considered the revision stage for it complete. After I fixed it up and gave it a final read, I submitted it and the story was accepted for that anthology. Yay! Not only was I happy to complete revisions on that short story and achieve one of my goals for the week, but I was also happy that the story was accepted.

 

My second weekly goal was to fill in all of the boxes for this week in my planner. To give you an idea of what that means, here is a random page with all of those boxes.

 

This may not seem like a VERY important goal to anyone, but it was important to me. After I had two VERY productive days of filling in those boxes at the beginning of the week, I decided, why not take on the challenge to fill in all of them for the whole week? So I did.

 

And I totally SMASHED it! 

 

 I’m so happy that I was able to achieve that goal this week. There were a few rejections, but also a few acceptances. Yes, those extra things may have been more of replacers and not so much a show of what other work I did on those days, but they ARE a part of my workday all the same, so they still count.

 

Having a writing goal for the year is great, but weekly goals can really help strengthen a yearly writing goal as well. Even so, my weekly goals sometimes hinge on deadlines and what needs to be done NOW. Writers can use weekly goals to help them achieve their yearly goal, or do what I do and use them to meet deadlines, complete activity on a writing project, or keep the writing going strong.