How I Met My Writing Goal for the Month

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Writing the pages
Ain’t been no fun at all
History will tell us that you were small
—Good Rats

The first month of 2019 is now in the books. Only 11 months left to reach my audacious goal of writing 250,000 words this year.

So how did the first month go?

Very well actually. I ended up writing 40,702 words. That worked out to an average of 1,313 words per day. If I maintain that pace, I’ll write 479,245 words this year. That’s a lot of words, of course, and here’s the remarkable part. Writing those 1,313 words per day on average wasn’t a life-disrupting burden. In other words, I wasn’t in beast mode every day, pounding the keys of my laptop for twelve hours. It was pretty damn easy, to tell the truth.

What follows is the “system” I put in place to make the first month of my audacious writing goal a smashing success.

Breakdown the Goal to Manageable Steps

Two hundred and fifty thousand divided by 365 is 685. That means I have to write 685 words per day to reach my goal. Perfect. Two hundred and fifty thousand words is too large of a goal to wrap my brain around. How am I possibly going to write 250,000 words this year? Six hundred and eighty-five words, however, doesn’t short-circuit my brain. I can mentally handle that. That works out to writing roughly two and a half pages per day. Not easy. But certainly doable.

Breaking my audacious goal into a daily goal made my audacious goal less formidable, less intimidating.

Schedule Time to Write

I’m not a big fan of calendars, but because this writing goal intimidated the crap out of me, I decided to give Google Calendar a try. My Google Calendar now has three hours set aside every day for writing (5 am to 8 am). It also has time blocked out for other things I want to accomplish in the typical day (man does not live by writing alone).

Now, I don’t know if it’s the result of the enthusiasm one typically brings to the start of a new year, but so far this year, I’ve been very faithful to my calendar’s direction. It’s almost as if my calendar has become my immediate supervisor (Mrs. Groovy remains the Supreme Allied Commander). It says get up at five and write, so I get up at five every morning and write. It doesn’t make any sense. But it’s proving to be remarkably effective. On most days, I usually have 700+ words written by the time 8 am rolls around.

Track My Daily Progress

Like any money nerd, I love spreadsheets. Setting up a spreadsheet to track my daily word count was pretty straight forward. I created a sheet in Google Drive called “Writing.” The sheet contains six columns. The last column automatically calculates the difference between a writing project’s beginning word count and its ending word count. Here’s a screenshot of the last ten entries for January.

“What’s measured improves.” No truer insight has ever been uttered. Not only does my word tracker hold me accountable, but it also acts as a formidable spur. I ain’t going to lie. I get a kick out of seeing my daily word count grow. It’s pathetic. But it’s true.

Devise Strategies for Dealing with Inevitable Roadblocks or Hiccups

Just like you need healthcare and an emergency fund to protect yourself from the unexpected, you need a backup plan or a fail-safe system to protect your goal from the unexpected.

Life gets in the way of any goal. I’m not immune to illness or accidents. Every year brings birthdays, holidays, events, and vacations that will rightly put any goal on hold. And let’s not forget Mrs. Groovy. I love her to death, but sometimes I get the impression that I’m nothing but her beast of burden. Her Mr. Groovy to-do list has an uncanny ability to “autofill” whenever it hits empty. And make no mistake, Mrs. Groovy’s to-do list for me takes supreme precedence over my quest to write at least 685 words per day. [Mrs. Groovy here. Lest you forget we’ve got a house to furnish, 3.3 acres to maintain, vacations to plan, and other things to do. This writing hobby of yours ain’t my problem!]

Bottom line: I won’t be able to write every day for the remainder of the year. Nor will I be able to write 685 words every day I’m able to write. Life may get in the way of 10, 20, 50, or 100 days. I don’t know. But I have to be prepared for these “no write”  or “partial write” days if I’m going to reach my year-end goal of 250,000 words.

Here are the hacks I established to safeguard my year-end goal.

Write Early in the Morning

This was instituted so my 685 words per day writing quest would rarely if ever get in the way of Mrs. Groovy’s daily quest to focus my energies on the things she values most. Getting up at five gives me a great shot of writing 685 words before Mrs. Groovy finishes her first cup of coffee.

Write in Bed

I’m not a television commercial. I don’t wake up at a quarter to five every morning and bound out of bed with a huge freakin’ smile on my face. No, I wake up and say, “Why the heck am I getting up so early? Bite me, carpe diem.”

To get around the gravitational pull of a warm, comfortable bed, I devised a simple hack: Write in bed. Rather than bound out of bed with a ridiculous smile on my face, I grab my phone and open my Google Doc app. I then open one of the books I have stored on Google Drive (see below) and start pounding my phone’s keypad with one finger.

My goal is to simply write one sentence. That’s it. I know I’m not going to be super productive, but it’s a nice way to ease out of don’t-be-a-lazy-shit mode and transition into do-something-with-your-goddamn-life mode. And here’s the interesting part. That one sentence invariably turns into several sentences and a few paragraphs. After a half hour or so of finger-typing away, I usually have over a hundred words written.

Quick aside. “Write one simple sentence,” as you will see, is a recurring hack I use to prime the word-writing pump.

Steal Fifteen Minutes Here and There

Before I had my 250,000-word goal, I used my down time to watch a lot of YouTube. A classic example of this is the half hour or so before dinner. Before my audacious goal, I would plop down on the couch and watch a couple of videos on tiny-home living (or something equally banal). Now post audacious goal, I open my laptop and dedicate myself to write just one simple sentence. I usually end up banging out 50 to 100 words.

Have Plenty of Writing Projects in the Pipeline

I’m not a natural born writer. I like the results of getting my twisted thoughts in digital form, but I loathe the process. In fact, I’ve always viewed writing as an exquisite form of torture. It’s kind of like having my lower lip pulled over my forehead and stapled to my scalp.

To get around my lack of motivation, I simply started thinking of possible books for the Groovy Guide Series. Every time I thought of a possible book, I added the skeleton of that book to my Google Drive. Here are the Groovy Guide projects currently in the pipeline.

• The Groovy Guide to the Muscle Up
• The Groovy Guide to Doing Higher Education Right
• The Groovy Guide to Building a House
• The Groovy Guide to Geoarbitrage
• The Groovy Guide to Doing Australia
• The Groovy Guide to Fixing Healthcare
• The Groovy Guide to Writing an Ebook
• The Groovy Guide to Political Independence
• The Groovy Guide to the Bible

In addition to these nine books, I also have 68 posts in my WordPress back end with a status of “draft.” Here are some of the more interesting posts I have in the blogging pipeline.

• Licensed FIRE Instructor with a Board Certification in Gapology
• The Best-Laid Plans of Mother Nature and Mommy Dearest Often Go Awry
• Reflections on Charity from a Financially Independent Curmudgeon
• All the World’s a Laboratory, and You Are Either a Lab Technician or a Lab Rat
• NAAFM: National Association for the Advancement of Financial Morons
• What Pisses Me Off About Mobile Homes
• Ten Ways to Lower Your Cost of Government
• What a Degree in Financial Independence Might Look Like
• The Superpower of Expecting the Worst
• Ten Ways You’ll Know You’ve Been Sucked into the FIRE Cult

Haha! The Groovy Guide to Fixing Healthcare? The Groovy Guide to the Bible? What a joke. I have no business writing such books. Nor do I have any business ruminating and writing on most of the posts in my blogging pipeline. But that’s not the point. Many of these books and posts will never be published (the impostor syndrome is strong in me). The point is to have as many avenues to unleash my mind and plunk down words as possible. I simply can’t rely on motivation. I’m hardly ever motivated to write. Writing has to fall into the daily ritual category. I get up every morning and brush my teeth. I get up every morning and write. Having many books in the pipeline, and many posts in draft mode, is a clever way of getting rid of excuses. I’d have to be a pretty wretched soul if I woke up one day and couldn’t add one simple sentence to any of the books or posts mentioned above.

Focus on Getting Way Ahead of the Game

The biggest roadblock this year will be a vacation. Mrs. Groovy and I plan on spending five weeks in Australia this fall. And somehow I doubt I’ll be able to write 685 words per day while I’m down under. If I even attempt such a feat, Mrs. Groovy will surely smash me over the head with a jar of vegemite.

I’m going with the assumption, then, that I won’t write a single word while I’m in Australia. To remain on my 685-words-per-day pace, I’ll have to be at least 35 days ahead of the game by the time our Australia vacation rolls around.

To make sure I reach this sizable cushion, I created another spreadsheet on Google Drive to track my word-count status. It takes the words I’ve actually written to date and compares that total to the total number of words needed to maintain the 685 words per day pace. Here’s a screenshot of that spreadsheet.

In 31 days, I wrote 40,702 words. At a 685-words-per-day pace, I would have written 21,235 words in 31 days. This means I’m 19,467 words ahead of the game. Divide 19,467 by 685 and you get 28.42. I’m only a month into the 250,000-word challenge and I’m already 28 days ahead of schedule. I should have no problem being more than 35 days ahead of schedule by the time we jet off to Sydney. “What’s measured improves.” The system works.

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Commit, hack, track, and anticipate. Those have been the keys to my writing over 1,300 words per day in January. But can these strategies help with other goals? Or better yet, can these strategies help forge the discipline that creates the habits that the successful completion of a goal are dependent on? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.