So, even though this annual Medicare enrollment is the busiest I have seen in six years and that is creating tons of overtime work at my day-job I continue to make progress on my next novel.

This week, since the overtime is optional and the stress of it has cause my psoriasis to flare, I have reduced my hours back to the standard 40-hour week. I am quite happy that when I laid out my plan for this novel, I made my daily word count goal a mere 1000 words per day. Many days I surpass that target and since October when I started there have been just three or four days when I failed to meet it. This demonstrates the importance of modest goals.

When your goal is modest you will achieve it more often providing a psychological boost and a sense of well-being while if you make your objective too ambitious then frequent failure can provoke despair and senses of failure which hamper meeting the goal again and creating a feedback cycle that ends in nothing being achieved.

I could have easily set my goal at 1500 words per day. That’s a level I have consistently achieved before but knowing that the busy season was barreling down upon me I went with a more modest target and because I did, I feel good about my achievement and the work in progress is actually ahead of schedule.

My calendar shows my plan was to hit 46,000 words out of an estimate 80,000 by this Friday and as of this morning I am currently at 45,000 words.

My method may not be for you and your writing style but I find an outline, a sensible goal, and a reasonable amount of butt in chair and fingers to keyboard yields consistent results.