Why I'm setting goals

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The 2012 Taleist Self-Publishing Survey is closed after receiving  1,006 responses from self-publishers. Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill in and promote the survey.

When Dave and I first discussed it, the target figure of 1,000 self-publishing respondents just came out. It felt right: big enough to be ambitious and inspiring but also achievable.

We could just have opened the survey and seen how we went. I see now that would have been a mistake.

Things took off quickly when we opened the survey. They slowed a bit then David Gaughran wrote a generous plug that gave us wings. Round about the 600-respondent mark we hit a wall, however. We could have closed it then, thinking we'd got all the self-publishers we were going to get. It was, after all, a time-consuming and detailed task. Maybe 600 was the largest number of self-publishing authors we could expect to take it.

Also, the answers hadn't really shifted after 350 self-publishers had taken the survey so a total of 600 would have been a respectable number from which to draw conclusions

But we'd gone and done two things:

Got ourselves excited about the prospect of a truly meaningful amount of data
Liberally bandied the magic 1,000 number around the internet

It would have been disappointing all round to have on 600 responses. So we plugged on and we did it.

What happens now?

We crunch the numbers! That's going to take some time (weeks, not days). Make sure you're subscribed to the blog and you'll be the first to know when its ready!

More goals, please

I have read plenty about the importance of having goals and writing them down, even letting your friends know what they are so you've a compelling reason to keep going. Truth be told, I've ignored this advice before.

I have projects that I manage with David Allen's Getting Things Done method (which changed my life) supplemented by a Personal Kanban (similarly brilliant). But they're about completing tasks really. If you want to use them to achieve an audacious goal you need to set that goal first.

I've always thought that it was enough to have a goal like "self-publish as many books as possible" and "do more travel writing that you can sell". Surely if I was writing, writing, always writing, I'd hit those writing and self-publishing goals.

What Dave and I achieved with getting over 1,006 self-publishers to take the time (up to an hour for some authors) to answer our 61 questions has made me think I need to take my writing goals, quantify them and, you know, write them down. I'm going to have a good think about this but in the meantime…

What do you think? Do you have specific goals written up and does it help?

 

Comment on this post or share it at: Why I'm setting goals
Read more great content on the Taleist self-publishing blog