Planning Quarterly, Rather Than Yearly, Writing Goals

Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative is full of good advice and habits for anyone making their living in a creative industry, but the part that has been most valuable for me is his recommendation to limit forward planning to a three-month quarter instead of a year.

Henry recommends this because people (and organisations) have a tendency to develop permanent solutions to long-term problems, but it’s also proven a good timeframe for identifying upcoming disruptions that will impact on your process.

There are some disruptions that are easy to predict. My own calendar has recurring disruptions between December and February due to the concentration of holiday events and family birthdays, and used to include regular disruption every September when I worked at QWC due to the surge of writing events and activities around Brisbane Writers Festival.

But other disruptions sneak up on you without any particular warning, whether they’re good disruptions like an opportunity you weren’t expecting or shitty ones like a relationship breakdown or major illness. Things that eat up time you weren’t expecting and can’t plan for.

Keeping your goals quarterly, with a general idea of where you’d like to go long-term, makes it easy to adapt your process and evaluate what needs to change as external influences show up. It helps you figure out the hard edges of your practice–what’s really possible in the next 90 days? Am I trying to do to much?

For me, it’s a way of figuring out whether there’s the space in my schedule to do projects that will require more thought, planning, and revision than normal, or whether I’m better served keeping to the core projects that form the baseline of my year.

More importantly, quarterly planning gives you the space to recognise when you’re trying to solve a problem that’s no longer there. A chance to reclaim that space in your schedule, and do something more valuable with it.

It’s a chance to check in with your goals and figure out what’s no longer working for you, a chance to try and different solution instead of repeating the same one over and over.

You can hear Todd Henry talk about Quarterly Checkpoints for free in his podcast, but I’d strongly recommend picking up a copy of Accidental Creative if you get the chance. It’s a surprisingly comprehensive book for getting a handle on your creative life, and the system it offers is subtly but extraordinarily effective at moving you towards a more strategic approach to your creative life.