The Problem With Making Goals At New Year....And How To Fix That
Practicing The Write Stuff Issue #57
Back in Practicing The Write Stuff #13 I shared three goals I had for 2024. Those were:
Write and publish two bass guitar books
Write and publish three books as Paul T Wolfe
Grow Practicing The Write Stuff.
This post isn’t about setting new goals for 2025 and recapping whether I hit the above goals or not…but it’s about the problem with setting goals every New Year….(or annually) and what you can do instead.
So let’s dive into this.
#1 Let’s Start With How I Actually Did
Here’s what I ‘achieved’ based on the goals/targets above:
Wrote and published three bass guitar books. (Maybe four…have lost count). There are two in the works.
My first book as Paul T Wolfe is in Amazon’s review system…which means it could be published today. Or it could be a week depending on what happens.
Practice The Write Stuff has more subscribers than it did this time a year ago, plus there are 45 or so more issues. And from time to time I’ve posted things on Twitter that link to issues and so on…and gained twitter followers and links to various Issues of the magazine and views and new subscribers.
So a casual overview could lead to the conclusion that I 'hit my first and third targets and missed the second.
But that casual overview would miss a bunch of nuance. Plus the goals were high level overviews rather than detailed plans. And the big thing: setting goals annually falls down on multiple levels. Which is what I want to explore.
#2 A Year Is Too Long To Set Concrete Goals For
There are multiple reasons why. Here’s three of them:
Circumstances change. That applies to personal circumstances or wider social and economic circumstances. When things change…your goals should change.
Setting goals for a year out is a recipe for procrastination for most of that year, then seeing the end of year deadline zoom into sight and try to hit it with a mad dash in the last weeks and months of the year.
Unless you’re highly organized, the first review period is likely at the end of the year….which is poor from a course correction point of view. If you wait nearly 12 months and only then identify a mission critical error in your goals and planning…that’s a problem.
#3 So If Annual Goals Are Too Long/Too Unwieldy….What Are Alternatives?
Back In Issue #53 - Adapting Jesse Itzlers Three Things For Writers - I posited adapting his three rules for a great year like this:
One big goal for the year: writing the book that you’re most scared to write.
Quarterly goals: practice on improving one specific writing discipline per quarter
Bimonthly goals: every two months work on analysing and developing a great film to create my own story structure to support my long term fiction goals for 2026.
That’s one way of breaking down a year. The quarterly and bimonthly goals are pretty good, they have clear deadlines built into them, and if you read the original post there’s a process suggested to make sure they’ll deliver restuls.
The one big goal though….that’s vague. Write the book you’re most scared to write. There’s no specificity in that in terms of time frame, how to start, how to schedule the actual writing and so on.
So if you do adopt this system to create a great writing year….you’ll need to drill into that one in order to get it done.
And where this system falls down is that there’s no built in reviews (which are opportunities for reassessment and course correction).
So while the end of the year seems like an opportune moment for review and reset, it’s inefficient and goals set here are unwieldy.
Weirdly enough, last Friday I had to write the last three sections of the first ‘Paul T Wolfe’ book that I will publish (I have already written two that will be revamped and published as workbooks that I sell direct and not on Amazon)….and my resistance couldn’t resist one last little dig.
And instead of writing those three sections that would have finished that book off so I could hit ‘publish,’ instead I spent five hours putting together a workbook for my music students called The 12 Week Practice Cycle (which I’ve already hit publish on):
This is a musician’s workbook/practice system that’s based on principles found in the book The 12 Week Year. What I recommend is you take that book, read it, and…
#4 …Adapt The 12 Week Year For YOUR Unique Goals/Targets and Circumstances
Here’s what I like about The 12 Week Year that I think make this a better model to use for goal setting and actually getting things done than an ‘annual model:’
Setting goals over a 12 week period is much more immediate than setting goals on an annual basis.
Having weekly and monthly reviews helps keeps you on track and helps keep you accountable.
One of the biggest tasks: writing down your practice and/or progress. Every day. There’s a reason why if you want to lose weight you write every thing you’ve eaten down. Or if you want to get out of debt you track every purchase you make down to the last cent.
The second most important task: planning ahead and putting those plans on paper. So you have a target for the overall 12 week period. You also have a target for the upcoming 4 week (monthly) period. And for the upcoming weekly period. (I do ‘practice weeks’ that consist of five practice days.) And for the next day. So you always know where you are, what you’re trying to achieve and what you’re going to do tomorrow.
Sidebar: I find pre-writing my ‘practice day’ the night before allows me to actually get on with doing what needs to be done because my subconscious brain has been thinking about it while I sleep and I don’t have to waste any mental energy on the practice day working out what I’m going to do.
Being able to stack 12 week periods on top of each other. But also allow for say a two week vacation between 12 week periods.
The 12 week period itself is flexible…and will accomodate multipe different sized goals.
The end of each 12 week period allows you to review what you did, and decide where you want to go in the next 12 week period. So if your circumstances change - whether personal or societal - it’s easy to pivot what you’re doing to where you want to go.
#5 My First 12 Week Cycle In 2025
In 2025 I’m using my variation of this system to support various writing goals that I have.
Although I’ve got longer term goals in mind….I’ve narrowed down my focus into what do I want to produce/create in the first 12 weeks of 2025. And a 10,000 foot overview of that is:
Write Book 2 in January. This is more for myself than anyone else, though maybe some people will be interested in it. It’s a book looking at story structure of the first film I’ve chosen for this project.
Write Book 3 in February. This is a book that will sit in series with my first Paul T Wolfe book. Which will be officially published whenever Amazon’s algorithms decide. (Amazon says it takes up to 72 hours to publish a book….over the last three and a half years my experience has been that 24 to 48 hours is the norm but there was one book that took 6 days to be published and another that took 15. So it will be available when it’s available - I can’t change that, so I’ve already mentally moved on and will start promoting this when it’s actually available.)
Write Book 4 in March. There are two possibilities for this one….I don’t need to decide yet….so I’ll device closer to the date.
So you know…these are all books that are around thirty to thirty five thousands words long, structured as 70 to 80 short sections (see PTWS Issue #3 for more on writing in the kind of style that Steven Pressfield uses), and I routinely write 1500 to 2000 words a day. So this is all manageable.
The Ride Out
Before you make goals for 2025, take some time to consider how you actually make goals that can be implemented. Vague goals with no plan of implementing them will likely be things that don’t get done. There are plenty of productivity style journals out there….my advice is to get hold of a bunch, take what you like and discard what you don’t and create your own system that suits your unique personality.
PTWS Issue #58
Hopefully Amazon will have finally published my first Paul T Wolfe book by next week and I can finally talk about it! Until then Happy New Year!