Recently I’ve put up a big poster (more like 21 A4 pages taped together) over my bed. It has three main sections: calendar, tracking charts and goals section. I’ve created this so I can see my progress whenever I enter my room or look around it, as a way to be like “hey, this is what you want to do, don’t forget to work harder for it”.

The calendar section has a sheet per month and outlines available writing opportunities/competitions for me based on size, writing form and whether or not they have an entry fee. It’s filled with different coloured sticky notes of deadlines, whether they be real or self-imposed.

The tracking section monitors daily writing, and monthly and weekly words written (digital only, I’m not tracking anything hand-written and so notes and Morning Pages aren’t included in this stat). I track my ‘personal’ writing and ‘professional’ writing separately so I can get a visual of my productivity in both areas. I’ve set small goals (because I’m known to forget about these very quickly) for myself in terms of word count: 10,000 p/wk for personal writing and 5,000 p/wk for professional writing. The distinguisher between personal and professional writing is really determined by whether something is fiction or non-fiction, but the idea is that my ‘professional’ writing is anything that would affect my professional profile that isn’t a creative piece. Though I’m far from actually being a ‘professional writer’, I still use that term to distinguish the two.
The goals section has a few different things in it. Two pages are ‘motivational quotes’ that are really just inside jokes for myself (they’re not actual quotes, just me making fun of myself) and the other for pages outline: Writing Goals 2020, Professional Writing Goals (for my blogging), Project of the Month and Focus Projects (long-term projects that I’ve been working on since forever).

I’ve more or less reached a point where I have actually acknowledged that I’ve wasted a lot of time in the past. Of course, there were years where there was so much going on that I probably couldn’t have done much better even if I went back in time, but now I’m turning twenty-five at the end of the year, the need to properly develop myself and put myself out there is stronger than ever.

Let’s do this!