MEASURING UP FOR MARCH - WITH A HALFNANO

THINKING SMART

I've been teaching, part-time, for two months now. Planning, preparing, teaching, assessing and evaluating is sponging up a lot of my writing time.

It didn’t take long before I realised I had begun to think in a teacher-ly way: SMART targets are, again, an important part of my life.

The foundation of all teaching is identifying an appropriate learning goal – a SMART goal

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Realistic

Time Bound

Once I started to plan using SMART targets they quickly seeped into my writing plan too. 

My specific goal is to write more.

This goal is no stranger to most writers. Most of us want to write more, to complete the draft of the wip and to balance all the other demands too. 

Write more? The trouble is... this goal is not specific. It is not measurable. When I wanted to go full-out and write at NANO speed, I suspected that target might not be attainable or realistic.

I needed to find a way to challenge myself, to quantify how much writing was More. I worked out what my output was over a five day period. It varied so I looked for an average. I wasn’t happy with the sluggish climb. 

I wanted something that would be encouragingly more rather than discouragingly unachievable.

 As a SMART target, I want to write more becomes:

I want to write 1,500 words a day, for five days per week, for the next month - that's like a HALFNANO :D

ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THE WAY YOUR WORD COUNT IS RISING? 

JOIN ME ON MEASURING UP IN MARCH - THE HALFNANO

HAL LONGLEAT AND THE TROUBLE WITH TRUTH

When everyone else crowded forward, to get a better view, Hal hid in the shadows by the stable door. He chewed on a grubby fingernail. He rubbed the top of the short nail against a tooth. It scraped and clicked and filled his head with noise.