What if you can’t do goals?

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This is a question no one asks, ever. When I searched online for this phrase specifically, I got a lot of reasons you can’t accomplish your goals:

• No motivation (read: You’re just lazy)
• Poor planning (What if you can’t do planning?)
• You don’t know how to do it (this sounds suspiciously like what outlining people say about outlines)
• Excuses, excuses, excuses (Dean Wesley Smith says a form of this)

Is this just me, or are these really pretty negative?

Goals surfaced as a big deal thing with productivity advice. According to Cal Newport in one of his podcasts, productivity today originated in Silicon Valley. Basically, productivity is computer programming. And goals are linked with productivity, and career.

I’ve ready many, many productivity books. Probably too many. Most of them followed the same general pattern. Link your tasks to your goals (always The Career as if you had no life outside of work) so you can accomplish them. In an Annual Review class I took several years ago, Tiago Forte of Building a Second Brain said he believed that productivity would be replaced by goals.

I think he’s right, but not in the way he thinks. Goals are productivity. We see a variation of this in the diet culture now: Relabeling the marketing. Diet culture stopped selling in 2017-2018, so they rebranded as wellness. That’s when Weight Watchers changed their name to WW. Wellness lectured on eating the correct foods and avoiding a laundry list of foods as “inflammatory.” But wellness may have run its marketing course. Now, as we roll into the new year when the companies sell us on weight loss goals, they’re changing the labels again, back to diet. Now the companies are selling, “Eat what you like.” Others are using longevity.

Goals are all wrapped up in diet culture, as well as fitness, your job, and, of course, writing. Many people promoting goals are marketing. To get you to buy that diet program, to get you to buy that app/tracker, to get you to buy that planner. The marketing spiel shows up in the emotion in how they sell: “Powerful goals,” “achieve your goals and succeed,” and “higher performance.” I pulled these from a general search on goal setting and didn’t have to work hard to find them.

Somehow, New Year’s resolutions shifted to goals as if they were the same thing. Resolutions are more fuzzy and hopeful; with goals, we think of football.

Of course, I looked up the meaning of both words in Merriam-Webster:

Goals: “The end toward which effort is aimed.” The rest of the definitions are sports and games, so it’s easy to imagine football. This one’s based more on winning (and if there are questions on how writing is treated with this, anyone hear the phrase, “Win Nano”?)

New Year’s Resolution: “A promise to do something in the new year.” That’s a completely different meaning than goals. This one’s based more on hope. But hope is fuzzy and you can’t sell it.

For writers, goals show up with only things that can be measured:

• Write five books in a year
• Write 1,667 words a day
• Write every day

Everyone leaves off the non-metric things, like researching, revising, cycling, proofreading, and even thinking. The last is even scoffed at by some writers.

At 20 Books Las Vegas last November, I attended a mastermind session. I thought it might have some craft-based areas. Nope. Not at all. I supposed learning craft is hard to define as a goal because there aren’t any metrics. You can measure the number of classes you took, hours spent, but not the actual learning. It’s fuzzy, too.

Instead, everyone in my group—we all had published ten books—did a round-robin discussing what our goals were. I mentally cringed. I’ve always hated it when people ask what your goals are. Because, when it was my turn, my answer was, “I can’t do goals. They’ve never worked for me.”

I got a very brief silence (kind of like being a pantser in a group of outliners) and then everyone launched into a discussion about production goals. Oddly, no one in the group knew what those were and the one goalless person had to explain it. 😊

Goals have always perplexed me, though I could never explain why. I just don’t connect particularly to them. If I create a goal, they don’t motivate me to complete them. When I’ve had to create one, like for the day job, I start with “What do they want to see?” Even when I was in the Army and my sergeant was preparing to send me to the promotion board, he asked what my goal for NCO was (the only “goal” for promotion for me was more money in my paycheck. There are priorities). 

But I’ve tried the usual for writing, because everyone said you were supposed to do that. Joanna Penn describes a production schedule and measuring daily words. James Scott Bell tells us to do word count quotas (is it just me, or do you think of speeding tickets when you hear quotas?). Dean Wesley Smith defines levels of pulp speed, because, well, you’d have to track the words to know you were fast.

Most often, when I set word count goals and moved forward, I simply forgot they existed. I often would find the spreadsheet I was tracking it in several months later, with maybe a week filled in. Even when I got a really pretty one that I liked, with the calculations done for me, it made no difference.

Some will say that I haven’t picked the right goals or didn’t do them right. That sounds an awful lot like what outliners tell pantsers, that if the outline didn’t work, it wasn’t the right one or I didn’t understand how to do them. Or that I should put a reminder on my calendar, based on the assumption if I saw it there, I would do it. Others will tell me I don’t want writing bad enough if I can’t make a daily word count (this to a person who went through a terrible period where I felt like I had broken my writing ten ways to Sunday and despaired I would never finish a novel. Most people would have quit).

None of it’s true.

For me, 2023 was a big change. I took the Clifton Strengths test after reading Becca Syme’s Dear Writer You Need to Quit. And it explained a lot. One of those things is why goals don’t work very well for me.

These are my strengths:

1. Intellection
2. Ideation
3. Input
4. Adaptability
5. Futuristic

Adaptability and Futuristic are time-driven goals. Futuristic is, well, futuristic. Another high futuristic writer took great pleasure in feeding her strength by working out goals for the next decade. I can’t do that myself because of the opposing one of Adaptability. Adaptability is the “now” strength. It takes all its energy from firefighting. It thrives on change.

From Gallup on Adaptability.

“Worry less about long term goals. Annual resolutions are not going to seem real to you. Focus more on what you are doing today. Don’t worry about doing too much prep work.”

And from another Gallup post:

“Because they find fulfillment in taking each day as it comes and living in the here and now, those with strong Adaptability talents may not be able to clearly present goals and objectives — nor may they be particularly able to articulate past processes or connect the past to the present.”

This video charmed me (dogs! Golden Retriever!). But it’s a perfect description of how Adaptability goes through the day. At work, I’m working on Task A, go look something up, and next thing I know I’m on Task D, though I have no idea how that happened. If I set a goal, as I move further away from it, everything else comes in, and Adaptability happily follows the flow. This is how I can set a goal and completely forget it exists.

I note all of this because we get shaped a lot by marketing, most of it subtle. I think even some of the writers are unaware that they are repeating the marketing spiel they’ve heard. Worse, we hear it repeated so often, we think it must be true for everyone.

Productivity stopped selling as well, so everyone relabeled it as goals, habits, and even passion. They make money off telling everyone we’re all the same (because if they said we were all different, the marketing doesn’t work). All you need to do is look for the emotional connection:

1. Don’t you want to be successful?
2. Don’t you want to hold a book in your hands?
3. Don’t you want to be published?

Followed by “Goals are the way to do this!” (Or habits or passion.) Of course, this leaves writers like me who can’t do goals at all, thinking something is wrong with them. I’m not the only one who can’t do word count goals. Another writer friend says she focuses on the metric (the numbers) rather than the writing.

Something to think about: Word count goals are a relatively new trend, because you have an app that counts the words. SMART goals, which states goals should be measurable, also showed up in 1981 at the same time as personal computers, leading today to app trackers of all kinds. But when writing was done on a typewriter, no such word count was available. Writers still had to provide a general word count so the editor would know how much space the story would take up. If memory serves, you counted the number of lines on the page, then picked an average line and counted those words. Then you did the math to figure out what the average number of words were per page, then multiplying that by the number of manuscript pages.

The writers of that time most likely measured productivity by number of pages, since it was a physical page that you pull out of a typewriter. But probably wasn’t tracked anywhere; it would have been more likely it was more of, “The story needs to be in the mail by the end of the week, so I need to make sure I get three pages done today.”

The modern day obsession with goals—yes, obsession, driven by marketing to us—leads writers to describe how to get more and more word count. Michael La Ronn mentioned in one of his books that you could take your cell phone with you and write in all those little pockets of time where you have ten minutes. A writer friend tried to do that, and just couldn’t. She needed time to warm up into the story. I think the pockets of time method works for Dean Wesley Smith’s Writing into the Dark, but that assumes you can write exactly like DWS does.

Pockets of time can be very problematic, as is the focus on getting the numbers. This is classic productivity thinking. In many of the productivity books I read, the authors talked about jamming more and more into your day. If you had five minutes before a meeting, that was a great time to catch up on email. You could keep a list of easy, quick tasks to do when you suddenly had ten minutes free.

Exactly when do you have time to be a human being?

So when you go into 2024, think about your differences. If goals don’t work for you, that’s fine. You’re not broken. If goals do work for you, don’t let them turn you into a machine.