What Are Your Writing Goals for 2008?

www.inkthinkerblog.com — Every year, Devon Ellington leads her readers in an exercise to identify goals, dreams, and resolutions. And every year I mean to participate and then don’t! But if there’s one thing I learned in 2007, it’s that you can’t reach your goals if you don’t know what they are. Trying to do so is like setting sail without a compass. Or something.

And many of my freelance colleagues are compass-less. You don’t have to schedule out every single minute of every single day, but it helps to have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual goals. Start with the big ones and work backwards. For instance, my goal might be to make $95K as a freelancer next year. A great goal! But if I don’t break that down into the steps I need to take to get there, I might as well not have a goal at all. I need to know how much I need to earn every day, week, and month so I can stay on track with achieving my goal.

Another goal might be “to improve my freelance business.” That’s all well and good, but if I don’t qualify and quantify what that means, how will I know I have succeed? How do I measure “improvement”?

In the past, Devon’s GDRs have been more list oriented (see GDR for 2007), but this year they’re paragraphy, perfect for those writers who love to wax eloquent. I think both versions are worth checking out. Whether you share your responses publicly or just keep them to yourself, do complete this exercise. I think you’ll find that thinking about your goals and formalizing them makes a huge difference in your success rate.

Do  you  have some goals in mind already? Leave a comment and tell us what they are!

Tags: freelance writing, goal setting

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