plan your 2025 goals with me!
(psycho novelist edition)
A few months ago, I wrote about the concept of a “time funnel,” which is the method I use for turning my long term goals and dreams into every day tasks.
You probably don’t need to go back and read that, since the process is fairly simple and I’m going to go through it again below with my own 2025 goals as an example.
Last time, my main goal was to finish writing A Crystalline Frequency by the end of 2024, which…didn’t happen, ha. (I ended up getting too invested in The Boy Band Curse instead.)
Anywayyy, the point is that your goals don’t have to stay rigid, and you’ll probably have to make updates to the plan every month (or sometimes every week), but long term planning is a good way to prove to yourself that your goals ARE possible, as long as you can reach your daily/weekly/monthly progress points.
Get out your notebook and write down the text in bold below to follow along with your own plans:
2025 Goals: (write down your own; mine are:) publish The Boy Band Curse, Affinities book 5, and Glitter & Gore book 2; finish writing A Crystalline Frequency
These are obviously a lot of goals, and you might have a lot too. What you’ll want to do is prioritize them, break them down into steps, and give each a rough deadline. I sometimes do this by estimating how long each step will take and adding up that time to find a realistic end date, but if you have a set deadline you need to stick to, then you’ll work backwards to determine how long each step should take.
For me the breakdown of yearly goals looks like:
2025 Goals breakdown:
Publish The Boy Band Curse on April 1st
-finish the first draft (I’m about halfway done)*
-edit
-format, prepare for publication
Publish Affinities book 5 in July
-finish the first draft (I’m already more than halfway done)
-edit
-format, prepare for publication
Publish Glitter & Gore book 2 in October
-start and finish the first draft
-edit
-format, prepare for publication
Finish A Crystalline Frequency before the end of the year (so within 12 months)
There will be other micro-goals and tasks within all of these (for example, I’ll need to market all the books as well), but these are the biggest and most important tasks when it comes to actually finishing the books and getting them out into the world.
*I should add, my first drafts are very clean and usually only need 1 thorough edit and then 1 quick proofread (in which I’m mostly just finding the few straggling typos). If your first drafts are messy, you might want to plan for multiple edits, and perhaps time that the manuscript is with a professional editor.
Quarter breakdown
Since The Boy Band Curse is going to be my main focus for Quarter 1, that’s the goal I’ll use for the example of quarterly tasks.
…I’m also going to begin work on G&G2 during this time, once I finish drafting TBBC.
…Aaand I need to find a specific place to put A Crystalline Frequency drafting since that’s a longer goal without a super specific end date. For this I could just choose one month to really dedicate to it, but what I’ll most likely do is slowly write about a chapter or two every month, so I’ll need to work that into my quarterly goals.
With goals like ACF, I’ll divide my overall goal (finish the novel, write about 60k) by 4 quarters or 12 months, and that’ll mean I need to write about 15k words each quarter and 5k words each month.
I also need to look at where I want to be by the end of March with TBBC. Since I’m publishing right at the start of Quarter 2, it’s easy for me to divide all the work throughout Quarter 1.
Then, since I want to get started on G&G2, I’ll need to see when I’m done drafting TBBC and calculate how many months I’ll need to write draft 1 of G&G2. BASICALLY I’ll work backwards from my October goal, estimate how long formatting will take, then how long editing will take, then I have my drafting time left over. (I will specify this in monthly goals; for now, we’re just gonna say “start G&G 2”)
Here’s what my Quarter 1 goals will look like:
Quarter 1 goals:
The Boy Band Curse
-finish first draft (less than 40k left, hopefully)
-edit (it’ll probably be a 100k word novel total…DON’T QUESTION ME)
-format and prepare for publication
A Crystalline Frequency
-15k words (probably 4-7 chapters, although I’m personally going to focus on word count not chapters)
Glitter & Gore book 2
-start writing (I’m assuming this book will be at least 150k hehhh)
Monthly breakdown
Now it’s time to break things down into the first 3 months of the year.
This is where you’ll definitely want to start putting numbers on things, if you haven’t already. Don’t be afraid to push yourself a little, but also be realistic about how long you think things will take, and accept that even then, things might need to be delayed, moved, or reworked in some way.
Since I have 3 tasks for TBBC, I can easily plan to chunk one task into each month.
ACF is easy too, just 5k per month.
G&G2 is a little tricky since I need to think farther ahead and account for much more of the year.
With the goal in mind of finishing the writing process for TBBC by the end of January, I could realistically begin drafting G&G2 in February. Given that, and the 2 months post-draft that I want to edit, format, etc., I’ll have seven months to write the book. It’s probably gonna be more than 150k, let’s be real, so I’m going to overshoot and give it 170k as the possible total that I need to divide into 7 months. That’s roughly 24k words per month, which is doable with my other goals.
Monthly goals
January:
The Boy Band Curse
-finish first draft (40k words)
A Crystalline Frequency
-write 5,000 words
February:
The Boy Band Curse
-2 rounds of edits
A Crystalline Frequency
-write 5,000 words
G&G2
-write 24,000 words
March:
The Boy Band Curse
-format, finalize cover, order copies of the books, etc.
A Crystalline Frequency
-write 5,000 words
G&G2
-write 24,000 words
Weekly breakdown
Now it’s time to focus on January specifically.
You can break this into roughly 4-5 weeks if your goals are less numbers based. Since mine are fairly numbers-based, I’m going to divide each goal by 31 days, but for the sake of showing you, I’ll do a weekly version.
I don’t tend to like writing two different stories in one day, so I will give myself specific days to work on ACF. For this example, since the first week of January is short (4 days), that week will go to ACF. (In actuality, I’m probably going to wait to get back into ACF until I’m done with TBBC around the end of the month.)
Weekly goals
Week 1 (Jan 1-4): 5,000 words of A Crystalline Frequency
Week 2 (Jan 5-11): 10,000 words of The Boy Band Curse
Week 3 (Jan 12-18): 10,000 words of The Boy Band Curse
Week 4 (Jan 19-25): 10,000 words of The Boy Band Curse
Week 5 (Jan 26-31, only 6 days): 10,000 words of The Boy Band Curse
Daily goals/plan
This last part is best to put off until the start of each week, or you could even do your daily planning each evening before the next day.
We still have some time until January 1st, but I’ll put an example of the daily plan for you to reference when the time comes.
Personally, I will have my average daily goal (for January, it will be around 1,450 words per day), but I will write in my planner the night before exactly what I want to do the next day in a time sequenced order.
If your daily goals aren’t the same every day, you might want to write out a generalized plan of the big task for each day.
Random example if your goal is to write and post one article for Substack each week:
Daily goals
Sunday: brainstorm ideas for article (it’s good to add a number goal to this that way you aren’t aimless or distracted, so maybe say you’ll brainstorm for a solid hour)
Monday: organize ideas and outline (again, put a time goal or even a word count goal)
Tuesday: rough draft (agaaain, time or word count)
Wednesday: read other articles for inspiration
Thursday: finalize draft, implementing new ideas
Friday: final edit and post
Saturday: go out and do something that’ll inspire next week’s article
And NEXT you’ll want to do the daily plan, which is going to be a more detailed schedule including, of course, your big goal that we outlined here, but also other daily tasks.
Here’s an example of what my daily schedule often looks like (excluding some tedious stuff, but when you’re doing your own, you can include things like feeding the dogs, showering, etc.), and this will be my January 1st:
Daily plan:
7am- 3 solid hours of writing A Crystalline Frequency, amassing 1500 words (I’m including little breaks, so we’ll say this task takes 4 hours even though I’m focused for 3)
11am- marketing my books on social media
12pm- lunch, miscellaneous tasks
1pm- walk my dog at the park
2:30pm- more social media and other author tasks that come up
4pm- gym
6pm- dinner
7pm- paint or draw
8pm- read
This is my ideal day, but it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes things take longer than expected, sometimes things come up, and sometimes I have random bursts of inspiration to work on things that aren’t on the schedule. But for me, the goal I outlined through this time funnel is the most important and it’s the one I try to always get done even if that means canceling some other things.
HOPEFULLY I can come back in February announcing that I stuck to my January plan, and I can do another little “plan with me” time funnel for Feb.
And hopefully this was a helpful method/example for you! I hope we can all achieve our crazy goals for 2025 <3