When the school year starts and summer draws to a close, life tends to get busier – which makes it harder to dedicate sufficient time to your novel. Goal setting can be a great way to ensure you keep making good progress. Goal setting, in general, typically involves making a list or statement regarding what type and how much work you want to complete by the end of a set period of time. These goals will often differ from person to person to suit individual needs.

The first step to setting goals is to define your ultimate goal, which, if you are reading this blog post, is likely to write a book, manuscript, poem, or other form of literature. Defining your ultimate goal will help you decide what to focus on and how much time to allocate towards its completion.

The next step is to decide on an ideal timeline for completing it. Many factors could go into this decision. If you’re a student or working alongside a publisher, you’ll likely have a shaper deadline to consider. If you’re writing a freelance novel, you’ll have a lot more freedom on how long you take to finish writing. Regardless, you’ll want to set a tentative finish line. Having a set date to complete a project can help keep you motivated.

Next, you’ll want to calculate the minimum amount of time it’ll likely take to finish by your set date. For your calculations, you could write for an hour, see how much progress you make, and then approximate from there. This is by no means entirely accurate, but does provide a picture of your average work speed. For example, if you spend an hour writing around three pages, you can get a general sense of how long it would take you to write a 400-page book. From here, you can decide how much time to dedicate to monthly/weekly/daily goals.

Now, it’s quite easy to set goals, but actually sticking to them can be difficult. Finding someone to hold you accountable can be beneficial in helping you adhere to your set schedule. This can be a professor, publisher, literary studio editor, or friend you arrange to receive and read over your work at the end of your goal cycles. This gives you light pressure to complete set amounts of work.

That said, it’s important to make sure your goals are feasible. You don’t want to set yourself up for disaster by trying to do too much each week and possibly cause burnout. Your weekly goals aren’t a contract, they’re simply good benchmarks to help propel forward progress. Don’t be afraid to give yourself more time and breaks as needed.