Do you change your goals mid-year, for example when you break into a new publication, start getting regular work or making more money? Also, how do you differentiate long-term goals from short-term goals, and how do you make sure you’re staying on track?
This is one of my favorite questions because I’m a geek, very ambitious, and aggressively go after what I want, which means I think about goals a lot.
In reality, I re-evaluate my goals every day.
Every day that I haven’t had a good, productive day is a day when I think about how I could have.
Every day that I do have a good productive day is a day I think about how to repeat it.
I have long-term life goals, I have yearly goals, I have your normal monthly goals, and then I have the day-to-day, which I don’t really consider goals as much as I do things to get done. They’re what keep me working towards the long-term goals. I don’t have daily or weekly goals because my days and my weeks are too dissimilar to each other for me to consider having any kind of structure to them. I put things on my to-do list and I do them. These things help towards my goals.
For instance, on my calendar I’ve marked out each day that I have to blog and make a marketing effort. Those are two things I do each and every day, without fail (unless it’s absolutely necessary to take the time off). In my week, I’ll do what needs to be done in terms of the assignments I have, extra pitches I need to send out, research for my personal projects, etc. I put those in my calendar, in my to-do list, and I do them. These too, aren’t goals, but help me get nearer to them.
My monthly goals mostly have to do with productivity and income. I have an income goal that I try very hard to meet each month. I may or may not meet it, but I do try my best, and each month, I find that it gets easier.
The yearly goals take a bit more planning, and those have certainly changed from back when I started out to now.
In my first year, I just wanted to write. Anything and everything. What that needed was that I pitch with reckless abandon– to ezines, to small publications, big publications, magazines, newspapers, absolutely anything. I wanted to write, get experience, get credits, and while I wanted to make money (of course), that wasn’t my primary consideration. I wrote 100 articles that year (some short, some long, none more than 1,000 words), and achieved my goal.
Since then, I’ve been trying to reach income goals. For the first five years, I tried (and succeeded in) doubling my income each year. 2006 and 2007 were tough years for me, so all I did during those years was to try and keep afloat, figure out what I wanted to do with my career, and learn.
Over the last couple of years, my goals have been to focus more on personal projects and not have to do stories I’m not interested in for the money. I’ve worked on bringing bigger publications into my portfolio, writing longer stories, and only doing the work that appeals to me.
My goals for the next couple of years, as we begin thinking about starting a family, are to reach a certain income level, keep it steady, and reduce my work hours. So I’d like to be making a little more money than I do now, which is more than enough to live very nicely in India, and reduce my work hours by half. I only work 6-8 hours a day now, which is half the time I used to work when I started.
Your goals will most certainly change as your life situation changes, and in my case that’s been year to year, but for you might be month to month or decade to decade, who knows. The important thing is that you do keep evaluating how happy your work is making you and whether the path you’re walking on is the right one for you.
The best way I manage to keep on track with my goals is by really keeping them top of mind (I have a post-it on my computer that reminds me of them daily) and knowing how near or far to them I truly am. Any time I look at them and find that they’re no longer relevant to what I’m doing or want to be doing, I have no hesitation in wiping the slate clean and beginning all over again. For instance, one of my goals this year was to work on a book and while that started out fine, my other work has kept me so busy (and happy) lately, that I haven’t minded that I haven’t got a chance to work on it yet. When this slows down, as it will, or I find that it isn’t giving me the satisfaction it once did, I will sit down and re-evaluate.
So, in short, yes, I reevaluate my goals all the time, my short-term goals are really only items on my to-do list whereas my long-term goals are more about having a fulfilling career. I look at my goals list every day, which is how I stay on track with them.