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.
