WHAT’S YOUR FIVE YEAR PLAN?
Helping your achieve your writing ambitions, Gary Dalkin highlights the importance of setting your goals
In this two-part article, I’ll be helping you develop a fiveyear plan for your writing. Next month we’ll look at how to develop the plan itself, but this month we’ll be considering what your plan will be about – your goals – and how to make sure you have the time free to pursue them. After all, you can’t have a plan if you don’t know what it’s for, or have the time to carry it out. So here we’ll establish your goals, and do our best to see that they are realistically achievable with the time you have. Then next time go into more detail about developing your plan. But first, why a fiveyear plan?
WHY PLAN?
Depending on your inclinations a fiveyear plan may evoke thoughts of a totalitarian managed economy, or more optimistically, a space voyage to boldly split infinitives where no one has gone before. Yet planning ahead is neither the exclusive property of an allcontrolling state, or of a science fiction franchise, but rather a way to get from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. It gives focus to what may be a halfformed sense of purpose.
Yet we may instinctively be against planning. Perhaps because we are constantly programmed by advertising to be spontaneous and passionate, to seize the moment, to live for now. Which involves spending our money in ways which enable large corporations to fulfil their careful plans to meet their goals. (Which of course are all about transferring money from us to them.) A plan, by definition, lacks spontaneity. It can feel too much like hard work for no immediate reward.
SURELY FIVE YEARS IS TOO LONG?
Yet a plan gives us a way to mark progress towards fulfilling our own goals, rather than those of others. Attaching dates to that plan, aka deadlines, can hone a sense of purpose marvellously. But still, why five years? The answer is that five years is a significant period, time enough to achieve many things, but not so long as to seem like forever, not so long as to leave it too late to change direction if things don’t work out. Because a plan is not a guarantee, but rather an embodiment of your goals and a set of steps towards achieving them. We want to make sure those steps are realistic so we don’t become disheartened and give up.