If you are a creative and a dreamer like me, you probably love having big goals. Thinking about the future is fun for you. Dreaming about the books you want to write and/or the stages you want to speak on seems totally possible until you move into action towards those goals.
It’s wonderful to have big goals. The problem that most writers have is not understanding that in order to move forward, the smaller the steps the better. My number one productivity tip for writers is that every single big goal you have, can and must be broken down into a series of small steps.
When it comes to productivity as a writer, you can maximize your time by embracing tiny goals.
If you are in my membership group The Collective–Unstoppable Writers, you’d know that we talk about this subject every single day and how to break down our own goals. This is the one thing that revolutionized my productivity and the way that I approach my writing and writing projects.
In other words, I ask myself this question: “How can I break down my goals in order to make them pleasurable and doable?”
When we break our big, audacious goals into small steps…we are setting ourselves up for success rather than failure.
If you’ve known me for any amount of time, you know that I always ask myself, “What is the smallest step that I can take in order to move forward?
Whether it’s your book, your next blog post, or setting up an author page online…how can you break a goal down into smaller steps?
What is the next small step that you are going to take this week on your current project?
Rather than limiting yourself to goals for your writing projects, you get to remember that you are a whole person and you fit into a larger scheme of things. For instance, you might have a family or a job outside of your home.
Having goals in all areas of your life is important to moving you forward as a writer.
Perhaps you have a goal to improve your physical health and you decide to hire a personal trainer, even though you haven’t worked out for years.
The first day you show up to work out, your trainer says, “Okay, I want you to run 3 miles and then do 50 pull ups.” When you aren’t honest with your trainer, your trainer will unknowingly set you up for failure.
Technically, you just set yourself up for failure.
We expect ourselves to go from zero to mega, in one “full” swoop.
For example, you haven’t written a thing for months and you set a goal to write for 3 hours a day every day, you’ve already failed.
We can set ourselves up for success, rather than failure if we break our goals into small doable steps.
Think about what the minimum, viable step would be for you so you can do to take a pleasurable step forward.
Make sure your next step is a no brainer that allows you to show up and do the work. A step that sets you up for success rather than failure.
When we set tiny goals, we enable ourselves to move forward with consistency.
We are now moving forward from a place of power instead of a place of punishment and shame.
Being honest with ourselves allows us to create “realistic” expectations.
Unrealistic expectations set us up for a huge guilt trip. The next thing that happens is a feeling of shame and the feeling of not being enough. We start to punish ourselves even more. Sometimes we even intensify an unrealistic goal by telling ourselves that we are lazy and that all we need to do is try harder.
When we have small steps that are easy to execute and easy to check off our list, we become more motivated and energized.
If I set a goal to write for 10 minutes a day, I often find myself energized and writing longer.
When I’ve set a goal to write for two hours, I’ve always found an excuse not to write. Suddenly I’m cleaning my house because the step was too big. It felt heavy and daunting. More like the feeling of “having” to go to work.
A huge step will throw me into procrastination everytime. I start calling all my friends to see who can meet me for coffee.
I’m more likely to follow through when I break my big goals into smaller steps. So that is my number one productivity strategy for writers that I repeat constantly to myself, my coaching clients, and members of The Collective – Unstoppable Writers. This allows all of us to operate from a place of power instead of shame, guilt, and/or punishment. When goals aren’t broken down into doable and pleasurable steps, we fail before we even begin.
Even the people we admire and look up to…the ones who have attained the level of success that we long for…were not born into that success, it didn’t happen overnight for them either.
Sometimes it’s easy to think that the people we model our lives after are just lucky or that they are just stronger or they have more connections than we do. That is so not true! Every single success they have achieved is because of a series of small steps that they took.
If you’ve known me for any amount of time…you know that I always ask myself, “What is the smallest step that I can take in order to move forward?
Whether it’s your book, your next blog post, or fitness goal…how can you break them down?
What is the next small step that you are going to take this week on your current project?
Let me know in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.