How I set huge goals without getting crushed by them.

Friday's post got two comments by J.H. Moncrieff and Kelly Hashway (both ladies have awesome blogs, by the way), which basically came down to "How do you keep getting so much done?" and "How do you handle your discouragement if you achieve your goals?" 

Since it isn't the first time people asked me, I thought I'd go into my madness/method once more. Actually, I'm going to share my big secret: 

I set huge goals and then make a game of chasing them. 

If I think about it in an attempt to explain myself, it's a lot like a perpetual game of soccer/football/rugby/whatever else you can think of involving points. Or maybe I'm playing a game of Quidditch, because I remember that some of those go on for a while. The only thing here is that I'm both sides. Misha the writer/doer-of-things vs Misha the procrastinator. 

The more things in a day, the more times I score. And yes. I keep track. 

If you look closely, you'll see I have two Excel spreadsheets open. I open them up the first thing every morning. 

The first is this one: 

This is where I keep track of my writing/editing goals by month. This was September, but at the end of each year, I create a spreadsheet for the next year. (2016's is done too. I did it this month to take a writing break.) Basically, it started as a way for me to keep track of my rough draft's word counts and daily progress during NaNo, since counting by hand is a bit of a pain in the butt, so it's easier to only count toward the total and then subtract to find what I've written in a day. 

The big block on the left is for rough drafts and rewrites and the block on the right is for my edits. (I count edits by hour instead of words.) 

I have another block each month for critiques, but including it just makes the whole thing too small to see. Anyway, on all of the blocks, I color-code my progress so that I can see at a glance what I've been doing. I can also input monthly writing and editing goals (say 10k words and 15 hours respectively), and the spreadsheet calculates my totals, cumulative totals as well as daily goals and cumulative totals. In other words, this thing helps me keep track exactly the same way as NaNoWriMo's stats do. 

The other spreadsheet I have open looks like this: 

The words are pretty squidgy so it might be hard to tell, but you're looking at the month of September. Each color-line in the calendar other than turquoise represent particular monthly goals I've set. You know the ones. I set them on this blog on the last Friday of every month. The key to those goals are in the multi-colored blocks at the bottom. I try to keep themes. (Such as the Purple involves stuff I still have to do for The Vanished Knight. The dark green was for all my writing this month. Yellow was for my reading (and to count the average hours spent reading) and orange are my life goals.) Every theme/color has a primary, secondary and tertiary goal, as well as a space for me to mark them as in progress or complete. 

In other words, this little bad-boy is my score card. The things written in on the calendar aren't a to-do list. They're everything I've done. Every day. Saturdays and Sundays tend to be emptier because I let myself rest, and also because they're spent on less quantifiable things like spending time with my family or binge-watching series to recover from my hard work. 

This month, everything except for eight tasks (out of 24) had me making at least some progress (two of which were postponed due to circumstances beyond my control.) Of the remaining 16 tasks I set myself this month, I completed 4 plus a bonus task for that rough draft I hadn't set a goal for, so 5. Of the 12 remaining, I made significant progress on one. So all in all, I might not have finished the majority of my goals, but so what? Everything I did only sets me up to finish them next month or the next or whatever. But in the meantime, I know that very few of my weekdays (six) went without me furthering my writing goals in some way, and I compensated for those by working in on Saturdays. 

Also, to help keep things balanced, a quick glance at my word-count reveals that though I didn't achieve everything I set out to do, I still finished a whole round of edits, a full rough draft and about a third of my planned rewrite in one month.

In short, I won this round by a wide margin. Starting tomorrow, I get to see if (and how far) I can win again. 

And yes, this came is huge fun. There's nothing as awesome as marking things as complete when you have things to do and goals to achieve. 

What about the bad months? Oh I have those too. Usually, what I do is I focus on what I have achieved. (I almost always get something done.) Also, it helps me to keep a long term view in mind. 

How long-term? Well. The Five Year Project runs from 2014 to 2018, but the timeline I have (the one I always post on my update days) have projects pipelined. And to give you an idea, this is what the Project looks like visually at this moment. (Each row is a project, each column is a month and each block is a year.) 

Each orange block means something's been (or will hopefully be) published. If I can just get half of next year done, I'll be a happy camper, and currently, I'm pretty much set to get there. All those tasks that didn't quite get done in any single month still add up to me finishing things, so there's no reason to worry about any supposed failure. There are no failures here. Only failure to do things, and I know I will get to them at some point.

What about you? Do you set goals? How do you keep track of them? 

How to Work on Multiple Projects

Every time I update on my goals and people see how much I actually want to get done in a month, there’s at least one person who says that he/she doesn’t understand how I can work on so many projects at one time.

So I thought some of you might find it interesting if I explain.

At one stage, I used to work on only one project at a time, but even then, never quite. If I was working on one project and another idea came up, I’d postpone that idea until I finished the rough draft of my main project. In other words, I’ve pretty much worked on at least two ideas since half way through Doorways. (In case you missed it, Doorways was split into two halves for a publishing deal and I generally refer to either half by their individual titles.)

I’ve never worked on only one project from conception to final edits. I guess my brain just doesn’t work that way. Usually I’d take a few weeks off from one project before starting to edit it. In that time, about a month or so in, I’d start another project. Only rarely, though, would I work on another project while drafting another.

NaNoWriMo 2012 made me reconsider this. That year, I’d written an entire rough draft in two weeks, but it came short of 50k words. And because I hadn’t had time to think about something else to write and had only two weeks left, I had to give up.

Then in 2013, I started to think of how much writing time I actually lose because of the time I take before starting that second project. Worse still, I’m prone to writer’s block while drafting and in those times, I’d take weeks without writing anything while my mind figured out whatever was keeping me from continuing a story.

When November came, I decided to work on three projects: One main project and two others that I can skip to in case I wrote myself into a corner with one. It worked a dream. In fact, I think I almost hit 60k words in that time, and finished the rough drafts by the end of December.

Then came my five year goal, and I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone by running writing and editing projects concurrently. That, as it turned out, works even better for me.
How do I do it?

I always work on different genres to separate the stories in my mind. 
E.G. I have an epic fantasy, an urban fantasy, a contemporary romance, and a dystopian pipelined for rough drafts. For edits, I have the first two books in the same epic fantasy series as the one I’m drafting, a historical romance and a mythology retelling. Very little chance of confusion for me because everything looks and feels different from everything else.

Everything has a priority list.
I’ll pick one rough draft, one rewrite and one edit at a time and then I don’t work on anything else unless it’s done or I get stuck.

In case of getting stuck, I’ll pick something else to work on until I get unstuck. 
It usually happens without much conscious thought from my side.

I never shelve anything indefinitely.
If something doesn’t work and I can’t figure out why, I might move it down the priority list, but I never remove something from it. This prevents me from having a ton of unfinished projects in my wake.

Speaking of which, I write down any shiny new ideas I might have and add it to the priority list.
And then I go right back to what I’m actually busy with.

I use spreadsheets to keep track of how many words I’ve written, rewritten and/or edited in a day, month and year by project.
I also have a spreadsheet calendar where I outline each of the goals I set for the month, so that I can see if I’ve been neglecting anything when I shouldn’t.

On any given day, I pick what I want to focus on.
Sometimes, it’s to edit, or to write a chapter, or to rewrite. I never move onto another project unless I’ve finished that task (or get stuck).

I wouldn’t be able to work on the projects the way that I do unless I had that priority list and a way to track my progress. Without them I probably would just end up going back to working on one or two projects at a time.

Now you know my secret.

Do you work on multiple projects? If so, how do you go about it?