I feel good about 2017. In spite of what may be going on in our country and in the world, something is telling me that things will be alright. In a world that seems to become more unstable by the day, planning, setting goals, and being faithful to those goals has never been more important. That’s how you create your own stability.
What Is Success As A Writer?
That’s the first question that you must answer for yourself, and it’s one of those questions that you can’t look to someone else for hints to the answer. When you find your answer, you’ve found the first step to creating the type of writing career for yourself that you’ve always dreamed of.
As I said in my last post, the clarity that I’ve gained over the past year in regard to what success as a writer means for me is something that has taken me all of my life up to this point to gain. For some people success as a writer is financial. Some writers’ ideas of success are mainly about prestige. Some have a message that they feel charged to spread or they feel that they have a particular purpose to help others through their writing. Writing success for me is a little of all of this, but my idea of success is having a positive influence on the lives of others. I want my work to make people think, and I want it to inspire them to reach the heights that they want to reach. I’ve always felt that there is a talent in seeing the beauty and the extraordinary in ordinary, everyday things and events, and I want to teach others how to see life through that lens.
That’s the part of about writing that is inspired. No matter what your idea of success is and no matter how inspired you are, success will not happen without frequent, high quality planning.
I’ve talked a lot about planning over the past few days because I know that the beginning of a year always triggers people to start to make good on some broken promises from years past. Write that book. Start that business. Take that trip. Get that job. You can hope for these things, but if you don’t break them down into actionable steps that lead to your ultimate achievement of these things, 2017 will come and go and you’ll have the same hopes for 2018. Here’s the process that I’m using right now to plan the success that I want to see in my writing career this year:
Start With A Theme or an Objective
Decide on an objective for the year, then break that objective down into smaller objectives for each month and each week.
Assign Tasks and Routines
Make sure that the tasks and routines that you’ve assigned to your days help you to achieve your objective for the week.
Find A Great Planning System
Whether it’s a series of notebooks with different purposes, your favorite leather bound planner, or the Evernote app on your phone, make sure you find a way to plan your days that works for you. I use the Passion Planner along with AlishaNicole’s Monthly Business planner, but I’m always finding new things to try. I’m working on something that I’ll talk more about later in the year that will be specifically for helping writers be more organized and productive. I’m excited to tell you more about that in the coming months!
Brain Dump Often on a Master List
This one is crucial to your sanity. Please don’t try to keep all of your to-dos and want-to-dos in your head! Keep a master list of tasks and routines that you can pick from when you are creating your daily to-do lists. A master list gets tasks out of your head and onto paper so that you can focus on the tasks that are in front of you for the day. Whenever I start to get overwhelmed, I know that it’s time to sit down with my master list and relieve my mind from hold so much stuff!
Purposeful planning for success is just as important as staying inspired. It sets the stage for those inspired words to be read by others and take you to places beyond what you ever thought.
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