In September, I made it to 727 out of my 1000 minutes writing/month goal. I didn’t meet my goal (this time), but here’s what I learned:
- Having a goal to push toward works for me, even if I don’t quite get there. I spent just over 12 hours writing last month, which came out to revisions on 3 stories and about 5 pages’ worth of drafting toward a new story.
- I like goals that let me daydream. Unlike word count goals, which ultimately only count the moments you’re typing, a time goal allowed me to acknowledge the thought I put into my writing and revising. The ticker keeps ticking while I think about the right way to express a thought.
- The flexibility was awesome. Some nights I did 10 minutes. One Sunday I hit 90. Overall, my average comes to a little over 20 minutes a day–not a bad start!
- 1000 seems to be the right goal for me to set. It’s clearly tough, but I can think of a few nights when I probably could have put in another 10 minutes or so, and a weekend day or two when I blew off writing to do other fun things. Next time, if I’m going on a day trip with Andrew, I’ll write in the car in 10-minute bursts.
I’m doing a modified goal this month–500 minutes–in light of the fact that the wedding and honeymoon eat up the latter half of my October. After that, I think I’ll keep shooting for 1000!
I have encountered the same issue with word-count based goals; however I also found that a minutes per day goal did not push me enough to stop fiddling with existing sections and create new words. At the moment I am trying a two smaller goals a day so I cannot spend all the time not actually writing but can still feel justified in spending time on research or brainstorming,
I like it! I think time goals are working so well for me right now because I mostly am fiddling, but if you’ve been reading along for a while, you know that my goals need regular refreshing to continue to work. Breaking a large goal into smaller, more focused chunks seems like a great way to go about it.