Follow-up: Evaluating your progress and fine-tuning your process

A month ago was New Year’s Day. Hopefully you have lots of good memories of that day as you celebrated with family and friends—and hopefully you’re not looking back on January with regret. But if you are, you’re in good company. Plenty of people drop their resolutions by February, and it’s usually not because they’re a bunch of lazy losers who don’t have any willpower. Usually it’s the problem with the resolution itself.

When we set resolutions for ourselves, we need to take homeostasis into account. Homeostasis, for our purposes, is simply the tendency of living organisms, writers included, to keep on doing what we’re doing, whether or not our habits are good for us or help us reach our goals. And when we make a change, even a positive change that we really want, homeostasis is what makes us go, “Whoa! This is new! This doesn’t feel so good! I need to get back to normal!”

So if you’re thinking your new writing resolutions aren’t going so well, don’t throw them out entirely or kick yourself for lacking willpower. Chances are, you just need to tweak your resolutions to make them more manageable and less vulnerable to the ravages of homeostasis. Consider these traits of a good goal (provided, of course, that you’ve put your resolution in goal form):

• A goal should relate to your past and your present, not only your future. Sometimes people fall into the trap of setting a goal without considering what it is they actually want—or what they’ll want for the next twelve months. Goal-setting for its own sake can lead you to jump from one pursuit to the next merely to keep yourself busy. Your past year, decade, or life up to this point will tell you what it is you’ve wanted for a long time; build on that knowledge when shaping your goal. That way, you’re more likely to stay motivated, and the status quo of your life will be more supportive of your new goal. An example of a writing goal that relates to your life as it is now might be, “When I have my weekly coffee date with my friend who lives across town, I'll stay an extra thirty minutes to write.” You already have the routine of leaving the house and going to a coffee shop in place. Use that as a springboard to creating a new writing habit. But if your new goal is, “I’m going to spend two hours writing at Starbucks every afternoon,” and if you know your Starbucks run is literally a run as you fly out the door with your café mocha sloshing out of the cup, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to overcome all that homeostasis all at once.

• A goal should be entirely in your control. “Get an agent” isn’t in your control; “query five agents per month” is. Your goals aren’t your overarching dreams (which are also good to articulate); they’re the paths that YOU can take to reach them. If you’re looking over your goals and finding that the reins are in someone else’s hands, it’s time to take them back. Rewrite those goals in a way that puts you in charge.

• Your starting point has some valuable things to tell you. If your goal is to write for an hour each day this year, ask yourself why you didn’t do it last year. Maybe the answer is, “A few months ago, I discovered the desire to write, and my schedule allows me to dedicate that amount of time to my new pursuit.” But maybe the answer is, “I work full time and take care of my children, and when they go to bed, I end up watching whatever Netflix tells me I’ll like because I don’t have the energy to pick a new show—there are too many options!” Respect your starting point. Find a way to tiptoe away from it rather than sprinting if that’s what it takes to keep you going. Actually writing for ten minutes each night between episodes of The Office is better than saying you’ll write for an hour each night and quitting after two days or never starting at all.

• The best goals stretch you without overwhelming you. When you accomplish something related to your goal (finishing another writing sprint, querying an agent, or meeting with your writers’ group), how do you feel? Aim for something between “Totally relaxed, maybe even numb, like after I binge on The Office again” and “I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t enjoy what I just accomplished, let alone keep this up for a year.” It should feel like the mental equivalent of a good workout: you feel a little uncomfortable but also energized. You know there’s more work to be done, and you know you’re up for it because you know about homeostasis and have planned for setbacks.

So if you’ve found your resolutions aren’t helping you become the writer you want to be, fine-tune them before giving up on them or on yourself. Sometimes we don’t challenge ourselves enough, and sometimes we bite off more than we can chew, but either way, we’re allowed to revisit our decisions and try again. And once you find that sweet spot in the middle of too little and too much, you’ll be on your way to achieving your goals.