How much should I care about setting goals for my business?

How would I look if I said “I never set goals for my work?”

That’s not strictly true, but I have shied away from quantitative goals over the past several years. I used to set specific targets for every possible metric: social media followers, pageviews, blog posts per week. For my fiction work I set goals to finish a current manuscript or hit a target word count on a new one. I rarely met these goals and when I didn’t, I felt bad about myself.

Quantitative goals often rely on factors outside...