Ever feel like your New Year's resolutions vanish into thin air before January's over?
In this week's quick tip, we're talking about the difference between goals and resolutions, and how to turn vague wishes into achievable progress.
We'll walk you through the basics of the SMART goal setting method so you can make your goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. We share some of our favorite techniques to keep your story rolling, including the 'Seinfeld principle' for consistency and 'habit stacking' to implement your tasks into your daily routine.
Tune in for personal anecdotes and a dash of inspiration, to turn those writing wishes—or any project, really—into milestones.
FREE Mini Email Course
Have you ever struggled to explain to others exactly what you write? Or wondered which of the many fiction ideas running through your brain you should tackle? If so, The Author Wheel’s new mini-course might be your solution.
7 Days to Clarity: Uncover Your Author Purpose will help you uncover your core writing motivations, avoid shiny-thing syndrome, and create clear marketing language.
Each daily email will lead you step by step in defining your author brand, crafting a mission statement, and distilling that statement into a pithy tagline. And, best of all, it’s free.
Ever feel like your New Year's resolutions vanish into thin air before January's over?
In this week's quick tip, we're talking about the difference between goals and resolutions, and how to turn vague wishes into achievable progress.
We'll walk you through the basics of the SMART goal setting method so you can make your goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. We share some of our favorite techniques to keep your story rolling, including the 'Seinfeld principle' for consistency and 'habit stacking' to implement your tasks into your daily routine.
Tune in for personal anecdotes and a dash of inspiration, to turn those writing wishes—or any project, really—into milestones.
FREE Mini Email Course
Have you ever struggled to explain to others exactly what you write? Or wondered which of the many fiction ideas running through your brain you should tackle? If so, The Author Wheel’s new mini-course might be your solution.
7 Days to Clarity: Uncover Your Author Purpose will help you uncover your core writing motivations, avoid shiny-thing syndrome, and create clear marketing language.
Each daily email will lead you step by step in defining your author brand, crafting a mission statement, and distilling that statement into a pithy tagline. And, best of all, it’s free.
Welcome to the AuthorWeal podcast. I'm Megan Haskell, award-winning fantasy author of the Senyari Chronicles and the Rise of Lilith series.
Speaker 2:And I'm Greta Boris, usa Today bestselling author of the Mortician Murders and the Soon to be Released Almost True Crime series. In today's Quick Tips episode, we are talking about goals versus resolutions. What's the difference and how do each of them work? So, megan, why don't you tell me what is a resolution? I don't think I know the difference between those two things.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I think different people will have slightly different definitions, but I'll give you mine. And basically I think a resolution is a dream without a plan and they rely on willpower for change. So when people make New Year's resolutions, they go I'm going to go to the gym every day for the rest of my life and that's just not really practical and in fact, that's not even really what their goal is. It's like I'm going to lose 10 pounds but they don't think about the plan to actually do that in a sustainable, logical way that fits into their life. But resolutions are a great place to start, right Like they're like the place where, like you have the dream, you have the thing you want and that's good. You need to start there. It's just that willpower doesn't last very long.
Speaker 2:No, it does not. Yeah, and also, even apart from not having even the fact that willpower is kind of like a limited resource, also a resolution. It sounds like what we're talking about here is that you don't really have a plan to implement that. Oh, implement, Isn't that one of our keywords?
Speaker 1:It is, it is.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God, I have a feeling we're going to be talking about that, yeah, but you don't have a plan to implement this thing. You have a dream, a joy, a thing you want to accomplish, but you have like no idea how you're actually going to accomplish it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Would that be fair? I think that's fair. I also think resolutions when people say, especially like New Year's resolutions, right, they tend to be almost more of a punishment or an obligation rather than that piece of joy. Right, because it's like oh, I gained so much weight over the holidays, I need to lose 10 pounds. Right, like that's a punishment for all the fun you had. Now you have to do the work. Right, and that's really not sustainable. Or our brains, our bodies, we don't want to do the things that we don't want to do. That's why we don't want to do them.
Speaker 2:Wow, that was deep, it's profound, I know, I know it's really profound. No, I do know that it's more like I think of resolutions. I don't know, maybe somebody out there will disagree with me, but I think of resolutions as more the stick as opposed to the carrot.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, that is what I'm trying to say. Yes, that is a much, much better way of saying.
Speaker 2:And I have heard and this could be an urban myth, don't anybody email me because I have not done the research on this but I have heard that psychologically, it is more difficult to try to not do something than it is to actually do something. Yes, there's not a lot of power in. I'm not going to do this thing anymore. Like I am going to stop eating all sugar tomorrow. Well, I'm going to stop eating all sugar tomorrow. That's difficult, but if you had a plan, instead of sugar, I am going to keep my house full of fresh fruit and have apples and strawberries and grapes. Now you have some of you are going to do instead of the thing you're not going to do.
Speaker 1:Yes, so when we apply this to writing and not our health goals?
Speaker 1:I guess your New Year's resolution might be to finally write that novel that you've been dreaming of for years. You're going to finally finish your novel, so that's your resolution. But if you're relying only on your willpower to sit down at the computer and if you're not setting a plan or creating implementation steps or building habits, which we're all going to talk about in a bit, then the likelihood of you actually making the change in your life that you need to make to accomplish that goal is very low.
Speaker 2:Yeah, people usually do it for a couple of weeks. There's an analogy I know I keep going back to health, it's my personal trainer self talking here but there's an analogy everybody uses, like the rocket ship analogy. So you have these booster engines that ignite to get your rocket ship off the earth against gravity and through the atmosphere, and then once it gets through the atmosphere, then those boosters fall off and there's enough power from momentum and from the engine of the rocket ship itself to propel the ship wherever you want it to go. And I think that that's what willpower is, in a way, is. It's like that. It's those booster rockets. They use a lot of fuel, they're really hard to get them up and going and they have a point and a place and they're important, but they're not going to last very long. So you darn well, better make sure your rocket ship is aimed and that you have enough fuel to get through the atmosphere, or you're just going to finish and beat this analogy Fall back to earth.
Speaker 1:Keep that momentum going out Right? But, greta, because you have that experience as a personal trainer and fitness professional, you actually know a lot more about setting smart goals really than I do. I think that's kind of was a very big part of your job back in the day. So why don't you talk about what are smart goals and how are goals different than those resolutions? How do we create that momentum?
Speaker 2:Right. So smart is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound, and it's a pretty popular in business. I mean, it's been around for a long time and some people think it doesn't work very good and some people have changed the acronym, but whatever, I'm sticking with it. So first thing to note is that just writing down your goals makes them something like 50% more likely to happen. So even the act of writing it down is huge. But then if you take it even further and you look at these different aspects of your goal so specific would be. I mean, we go into a lot more detail in this in our book. I think productive writing habits is the one we go into it.
Speaker 1:Actually I think we do it in both productive writing habits and publish. I think they both have it. But anyway, yeah, so anyway.
Speaker 2:So specific would be like so say your goal, like the goal you said was to finish your novel this year. That's specific. I'm going to finish this novel, this, whatever your working title is. I'm going to finish this novel by December or whatever this year, in 2024. So measurable would be where you'd start to get into the more gritty like how long is it the novel? Is it an epic fantasy? Is it 150 pages or are we talking like a rom-com that only needs to be 60,000 words, a lot less pages. 150 pages? I didn't mean that. I meant 150,000.
Speaker 1:I was going to correct you, but deciding that too. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So measurable, like how many words are you going?
Speaker 1:for Make sure you get your units right. I know.
Speaker 2:Sorry y'all.
Speaker 1:See, I'm not being very measurable today.
Speaker 2:So Now you're starting to get down into the nitty-gritty, like, if you know how many words you need to have by the end of the year, then you can break it out into how many words you need to read a month, how many words you need to read a week, how many words you need to read a day. You know it's just math at that point. Then achievable, that's when you look at it and say, well, let's see, I am, I have a full-time job, I have three kids under the age of 16. You know, and I'm into, everybody in my family wants to eat healthy and I have to. You know, shop and cook every week and do everybody's laundry. So maybe writing this novel in one year is the pipe dream, you know. I mean, a lot of people set themselves up for failure because they're giving themselves a goal. That is just not. You have to sleep At some point right.
Speaker 2:So that's, it has to be achievable. And then relevant is does it really fit in you know, the rest of your life goals? I mean, is it relevant to your life at the moment, like if you do have a full-time job that you love and all the kids and everything? Maybe it's just not really relevant to your life at this point in time. Maybe it will be once your kids are off at college. Then you could pick up that goal. So that's the kind of thing to look at. And then, of course, time-bound is when you just really implement the thing and you start putting things on the calendar. What days are you going to do what you know? That kind of thing, yes.
Speaker 1:But now we're getting into the actual, like implementation. So we actually kind of did our little strategy here a little bit. We had our clarify and your resolution. What do you want to do? Simplify into setting your goals so that you know what you're doing and you have a framework around that. And now we're going to implement.
Speaker 1:Yes, no, thank you, yeah, no. So the once you have your goals set, I think anyway that the implementation piece is turning it into a habit and it's actually making those changes in your life to achieve that smart goal. So it's yeah, it's like your implementation plan, especially if it's an activity that's repetitious or long-term, like writing a novel, because you have to write every day or a certain number of days each week. You have to make it a consistent habit, otherwise you know it's going to take you a lot longer to finish that novel, for one thing, and you're not really changing your life to fit that goal into your day-to-day activities.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that I like to do is it's the we've talked about this in the past, but it's the Seinfeld principle, right where there's the story that some young comedian asked Seinfeld how he manages to work on his craft every day and basically, seinfeld came back and said you know you get a calendar. You put an X on the calendar every single day that you work on your thing, and the goal is to not break the chain. The goal is to have a long series of Xs on that calendar or on that planner so that you're building that habit. And that's, for me, has worked incredibly well to help me continuously make progress on my work in progress, my whatever novel I'm working on at the moment. So I think that's kind of a key implementation strategy. But I know, greta, you've done a lot with like habit stacking as well, like tying two things together. I think right.
Speaker 2:Yes, that can really help, like, because one of the things I found is that I can get super distracted and actually I know this sounds ridiculous, but actually forget to sit down and write. Yeah, I mean yeah. So I know that sounds ridiculous because it's such a big goal, but say you are doing along like. Your goal, like we said before, is to write this novel this year, and it's not that long of a novel, so really you only need to write about it for a day. It is so easy to push that hour off and off and off and off and off until you don't do it, and so one thing you can do, like in terms of this one, is you just make it a habit that before you open your email in the morning, you automatically open whatever program it is you're writing in.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And look at that, because you know you're gonna look at your email every day, so that as soon as you open your email or you think about opening your email, you're now like oh no, I have to open Scrivner before I open my email. Even if you don't go right, it's like open, it's in your head, it's a start.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know it's in front of you.
Speaker 1:The other one that I liked that you did, at least for a while. I'm not sure if you're still doing it or not, but was the 50 words before breakfast or before you start your day, or there was something there. I can't quite remember how you stacked it, but it was before you could have your coffee or before you could.
Speaker 2:Not before coffee. Oh yeah, you mean right, that's right, that's me, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's my habit. I wake up at 6 am and I don't have coffee and I go sit at my computer. But no, but there was something you did. It was like you had a 50 word minimum before something. How did you set that up, I forget.
Speaker 2:I made it part of my morning meditation routine, so I would do my reading, my prayer time, my thing, and then, before I got up from the couch to go get dressed and exercise and start my day, I would do 50 words.
Speaker 1:And no.
Speaker 2:I'm not doing it right now, but I'm also not first drafting right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's a little different when you're editing or in a different stage of the production process. But when you're trying to draft that novel, setting up a 50 word minimum daily goal before the thing or before you brush your teeth or whatever, like tying two things tying the thing that you already do with the thing that you want to do and making it a minimum goal, that can be a very powerful combination to make progress.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I think sometimes it's that breaking the ice is the hardest part. So for some of these things you just break the ice every day and then it's not so hard to go back in and get going on it.
Speaker 1:It's like going polar bearing, jumping into a frozen lake. You just got to do it. Once you're in, you're in and then you're fine.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, if you would like to read more about how I set my author strategy goals and habits, do make sure to check out the Clarify Simplify Implement newsletter. It is very descriptive. We just explained a lot of the philosophy which you go through this process over and over and over again in all aspects of things, and it probably gets a little bit repetitive, but I apply it to a lot of different things. So, anyway, if you're interested in how I do that and some of my different planner spreads and things like that, please go search for Clarify Simplify Implement on Substack or the link will be in the show notes. So I think that's it for today. Next week we are going to be talking about inspiration, so stay tuned for that and until next time, keep your stories rolling.