Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part I

Project management tools can be useful for writers, and help you stay on track. The first step in using these is setting effective goals. There are a number of frameworks that can be used. My preference is the mnemonic S.M.A.R.T.E.R. goals, an acronym that stands for:

Specific – If you want to target word count, for example, what are you including? Is this just fiction words, or does your blog also count? Do you mean first draft words or final edited words? Or both? It is important to know as it will change your system of tracking. Often times it can help to have separate goals for each well-defined area i.e. one for fiction, and one for your blog.

Measurable – ideally quantifiable. Wordcount is easy here, but so is writing six days out of seven. But “improving my writing” is somewhat nebulous. How would you measure that? Number of drafts? Critique partner evaluations?

Achievable – Writing a novel a day is not achievable. But is 100 words per day? A thousand? We will come back to this in the next section.

Relevant – Make sure it moves you closer to where you want to be. Don’t set a goal of 1000 words a day on your novel, if it will cause you to miss your deadline for the short story competition that is important to you.

Time-Bound: Most people find it easier to stick with goals if they have an end in sight. It also helps you plan when you will be finished with a specific project, or when you will do the all important re-evaluation of whether your SMARTER goal is working.

Exciting – as you should be engaged by your goal

Recorded and Reviewed – you should track your progress, an essential step to allow review and adjustment of targets based on experience.

Using this framework, if the goal I was excited about was to finish a 1000 word flash fiction we could say:

X words (measurable and achievable) of first draft fiction (specific), every Y frequency for Z months (time-bound) which I will track using scrivener graphs (recordable).

But how do you determine X, Y and Z? You can guess. Or, you can use quality improvement science to determine them. That will be the topic of the next blog post which will be part II.

I hope you find the above framework clear and helpful. If you have thoughts or suggestions, please share them in the comment section below!