Goal + Deadline = Magic

by Grant Faulkner

If you’ve done National Novel Writing Month—the writing festival that challenges people to write 50,000 words of a novel in just 30 days—and learned just one thing, it’s the power of setting a goal and a deadline to motivate you (and keep yourself accountable).

A goal and a deadline serve as creative midwives, NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty wrote in No Plot? No Problem!

I was the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month for 12 years, so I saw the magic of a goal and a deadline in action.

Why does it work?

The idea is to banish your inner critic, plunge into your imagination, and write your story today—not during that memoir-killing period of time known as ... “someday.”

Goals give us direction. A goal is the lighthouse that guides the boat to shore. A goal is the north star we follow.

For example, I’m an expert at fake productivity. I get trapped in an infinite task loop where I’m consistently accomplishing little actions, but making dubious progress. I do research (too much research). I tinker with the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter. I go back and do more research. Or I get distracted by the glistening sheen of an entirely different writing project. Or … I fall down the sinkhole of social media.

A goal without a deadline is like a class of students without a teacher—full of potential, but lacking structure. If you add a deadline to your goal, you’ve created a kick-ass recipe to write energetically and explore new terrain.

I think the main ingredient of finishing any writing project is showing up and creating some sort of progress and momentum with regularity.

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop,” said Confucius, who had to be talking about writing a book. Hence JanYourStory.

Creative benefits of JanYourStory

One thing most of us aren’t good at? We don’t make our creativity a true priority. We hope JanYourStory will give you the gift of making creativity a priority for a month—and then that it gives you the momentum to make it a priority even longer.

Maybe that means your house gets a little messy for a month or you eat a little more takeout in January, or your kids watch an extra show every day and you spend a little less time watching Netflix.

It’s all about finding the little pockets of time in your life that could make space for your writing and sticking to it all month long. We’ll be there to help you find those pockets and make the absolute best use of them that you can.

A tight deadline forces you to become more energetic. By focusing on what you can give up for a month and using that extra time to write vigorously toward a goal, you’re drawing from a deep well of creativity that would have otherwise gone unexplored.

A time restriction takes away the choices available to us—choices that can have a paralyzing affect, causing one to dally and maybe not start at all. Constraints, however, keep perfectionism from niggling away at you, so you dive in and just start writing because you have to.

Design your life for your future self

It’s all about designing your life around the things you rationally want to achieve instead of sinking into the powerful claws of more impulsive needs. We tend to be myopic creatures, preferring positive outcomes in the present at the expense of future outcomes.

But our present self is doing a disservice to our future self, who will scream back into the dark hallows of the past: “Why didn’t you work on our memoir?”

Think about how your present self can better serve your future self. And join JanYourStory!