New Year, New Goals?

In the New Year, you can hardly miss the many posts on writing blogs about setting new goals for the twelve months ahead.

Why Set Down Your Goals?

Setting down your goals for the year is a good reminder of what you want out of life.

Thinking about your new goals will also enable you to look back to the year that has just passed. Did you achieve your goals? Why didn’t you? Were the goals achievable, or not ambitious enough? Learn from what happened last year and adjust your goals accordingly.

Celebrate your successes and make sure your goals for the New Year reflect them.

Learn from last year. Not achieving your goals doesn’t mean you failed. Either life got in the way, or the targets you set yourself were too demanding.

As a self-published author, you are running a small business, and any venture whatever the size, requires a plan. From your general goals, you can easily establish a complete business plan for your writing business.

Why New Year?

Why set your goals down in January? Wouldn’t it be more productive to start setting goals in, say September, when we are refreshed from our summer holidays? Or when the new school year begins? What about the spring, when everything in nature starts to awaken once again and the winter melancholy is lifted from our shoulders?

You don’t have to set down your goals in the New Year – but because it’s the start of the calendar year, making plans for the twelve months ahead makes sense in January. It’s also easier to get hold of calendars, and you can feel some solidarity with others, who are also setting down their goals.

General Life Goals

Your goals do need to be just those you want out of your writing life, but you should start with what is important to you in general.

Setting down your general life goals first is a good starting point in planning the year ahead. I use a TRIGG Life Mapper to help me in structuring the year ahead, as well as monthly, weekly, and daily aims and tasks. I find having a physical diary on my desk where I can jot down my thoughts and to-do lists at the beginning and at the end of the day is very useful. But there are also many online apps and sites where you can do similar.

As well as a physical diary, I also make a Vision Board at the beginning of the New Year. I learned how to make one during my hugely productive years attending the Driven Woman workshops in London. A Vision Board is as far removed from practical goal setting as you can get, but completing one gives you a surprising amount of clarity on where you want to go and what you want your life to look like at the end of the year. When you set your mind free and design a visual aid for your wildest dreams, you’ll find what you really want out of life. You may be surprised! Go here to read more about Vision Boards and the Driven Woman Network.

Business Plan

After you’ve set down three or four aspects of your life that you consider important to you, you can start drilling down into each one to plan how you can improve on those aspects.

I use my general goal setting as a basis for a business plan, in which I include my publishing schedule and sales targets for the year ahead. From those, I come to an advertising budget, targets for social media following, the increase in the number of subscribers to my email list, and so on.

I have a number of spreadsheets that go into more detail, and I review these each month. As a self-published author, I have to be business-minded, and setting goals is the first step in having a business plan for the year (and five and ten years ahead).

Review Your Goals

It’s important to plan so that you can see the road ahead clearly, but your goals do not need to be set down in stone. Reviewing your goals throughout the year is a useful reminder of what you were thinking in January, but a review can also show you that you need to change course.

If the last two years have taught us anything, it is that plans can change and the unthinkable can happen. This means you have to remain flexible, however determined you are to achieve your goals.

In business, as in life, even in ‘normal’ times, plans change and targets shift. Don’t feel bad if you have to readjust your goals. It means you are simply steering the ship around icebergs. You’re still in charge of the vessel and its crew!

Happy New Year!

I hope you’ve found this quick run-through on goal setting for the New Year useful and that you have a very happy and prosperous New Year!

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