It’s the New Year. The time when most of us look at where we are and think about what we want to change. There’s something about new beginnings, isn’t there? Everything seems possible, if we just work hard enough. So we set about making our resolutions for the coming year, dreaming about all the things we’d love to accomplish. For some of us, that’s good enough–we’ll work on our New Year’s resolutions (or most of them) and be successful. The rest of us? Eh, not so much. I think that’s because making New Year’s resolutions is fine for minor things, but do you really want to base your writing career on such flimsy things? Yeah, me neither.

Forget about making those resolutions–to be successful at any career, what you need is a career plan and achievable goals. I spent enough years working for Big Business (multi-national corporations with 30,000+ employees) to know the benefit, not only of planning, but planning well. If you think this subject is a bore or not applicable to you (But I just want to write!), don’t turn away just yet. I hated the yearly planning/goal setting process when I worked for Big Business. The goals of my departments rarely changed and career planning was, to put it mildly, a joke. I understood the reasons for planning and setting goals–after all, managers had to have something to use to measure their employees’ productivity–but since I’ve always been a self-starter and over achiever, I rarely needed the reminder of where and how to prioritize my work.

Since focusing on writing as a career, I find that my attitude toward career planning and goal setting has drastically changed. I like the following quote from Kristen Lamb: “All Authors are Entrepreneurs.” That’s especially true in this age of turmoil and change in the publishing world. Suddenly, career planning and goal setting have become meaningful to me.
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