My goal for 2019 is to spend 1,460 hours working on first draft material, spread across my fiction, my PhD, and some projected non-fiction features I’m looking at for the blog. This largely equates to twenty-eight hours of drafting every week, or approximately 4 hours a day.
If I’m right in my estimates, this should be good for about 700,000 to 800,000 words over the course of the year, but I’m utterly unconcerned with the word count produced. My sole determinant of success in 2019 is pure hours spent with my but in the chair and my internet blocker turned on so I’m focused on drafting new words.
This is a pretty big departure for me–like most writers, I’ve tended to forward plan based around word count. My goals around this time of year would be focused on the number of words produced, or the number of things finished. I want to write 2,000 words a day, or I’d like to finish 20 short stories.
Switching over to an hour-based goal is an attempt to try and overcome the fundamental flaws of this approach: I cannot schedule 2,000 words a day or writing a story effectively, because I’ll only ever be using an estimate of how much time it will take to get those done.
It may be a pretty good estimate–I’ve been tracking my time pretty carefully over the last couple of years and know my average hourly pace while writing first drafts–but the moment I have a bad week my anxiety will kick in. Or I’ll find myself working eight hours to get 2,000 words, especially if I’m doing something tricky or trying to write something I’m not particularly good with.
The nice thing about setting a four-hour-per-day-goal? I always know how much time to schedule, and how much time to make up during those tricky periods where life gets in the way or I’m working slower than usual. It also means I have to throw consistent focus on creating new work, rather than obsessing about how previous work has been going.
On the other hand, this is an intentional cap that cuts things off–if I am having a rough writing day, I don’t need to push in order to hit my goal. I can just focus for the hours I need to focus, and get done what I need to get done. Given that I’m on a relatively free-form schedule until the PhD is done, those four hours of focus give me plenty of extra hours to handle research, work on redrafting things, and other stuff associated with writing that doesn’t involve first drafts.
