Setting weekly goals for your article writing could prove more useful than daily goals. The thing is that no matter how noble our business goals may be, life gets in the way sometimes, we are not living to work after all-we should be working to live, ideally. So where as it could be really fine and dandy to have your schedule finely tuned to enable you write everyday, it just does not always happen that way. The good news, however, is that with weekly goals you could still achieve your desired output, often more flexibly.
I found that to be true in my own case. I once set for myself the goal of writing two articles every weekday, and engage in other forms of writing on Saturday and Sunday nights. However, I discovered that there were days during the week when I wrote a lot more than two articles, whereas on a few other days I may not write at all.
It turned out that there were days when I was ‘in the spirit.’ On such days I rolled out one interesting article after another-effortlessly. But on off-color days, I seemed to labor just to get one article going. Fortunately, those off-color days were always fewer that the days I wrote well. And that gave me an idea: rather than aim at 2 articles every weekday, I decided to target ten or maybe even twelve articles for the entire week. And it worked!
The way I do it now, during those days of the week when the brain appears super-charged, I just keep rolling the stuff out, not limiting myself to any predetermined number of articles. And I often end up writing up to seven fresh articles in a single day. Now do the math: if I am able to do that just twice in a week, haven’t I surpassed my weekly total of two articles per weekday? So, boy, weekly writing goal trumps the daily stuff!
The method above has worked well for numerous authors. But to successfully work this method, here are a few things you need to get right:
Know the end from the beginning-determine beforehand the number of articles you intend to have published for the entire year. Then break this down to months, and then weeks. Consider the amount of time you have available each week for article writing, and then estimate the amount of time to allocate to your current article project, taking into consideration subject areas and your knowledge level in each. This helps you determine ahead of time what amount of time may be taken up by researches-which may be substantial!
Based on the time available, set a reasonably high but attainable weekly goal so as to maximize the time you have allotted. Try and categorize your writing projects according to their types, and length. Whether the articles you’re working on are full-length (400-750 words), fiction, non-fiction, poems or blogs, each category requires different parameters, style of writing as well as length of time.
Review your goals and weekly article production at the beginning of each week to see how you’re fairing and to make modifications for the new week, if necessary.
Setting weekly goal for your writing is extremely helpful-a lot better than daily goals. But all goals amount to nothing if you do not follow through with them. In the end, goal-setting is just the primary step of a process, where as working your goal is the ongoing process. The tips offered in this article should help you set and stick to realistic weekly goals and thus increase your article production.
