In a recent post, C.S. Lakin offers advice for strategically planning the milestones towards your creative goals. “With each specific goal you hope to reach, you want to come up with specific milestones that are doable in a certain amount of time,” Lakin says. “Working backward is the best way to do this.”
She suggests:
- Start with your final milestone and work backwards. Ask yourself which will be the last milestone for reaching your goal. If your goal is to complete a first draft of your novel, then typing “The End” or writing 100,000 words will be your final milestone. Working backwards, you can develop an idea of what word count you need to reach by each month or quarter to hit that 100,000 word mark. If you need to conduct some research before you can write certain sections, build that into your milestones as well. For example, you might want to complete your research during your first quarter and plan to hit the 50,000 word mark by the end of June.
- Move your milestones around. Once you have an idea of your milestones, put them in an order that makes sense. If you need to travel for some of your research, you might move some of your milestones to summer. If you want to complete a thorough outline before you start to write, you might move your midpoint milestone to September.
“You may need to rewrite the milestones a bit or add a few more between them as you work steadily toward your destination,” Lakin says. “But the key is to fix your sight on your vision and work steadily toward it.”
