How Setting Ridiculously Small Goals Can Lead to Big Success

The magic of the teeny-tiny.

Tiny things add up. Taken on their own, they might seem insignificant, but put them all together, and yeah. They can lead to big things.

Several years ago, when I’d just started Ninja Writers, I signed up for a year-long business coaching program. I knew I had a good idea and it was working, but I needed some guidance if I was going to hold on to this thing.

Part of that program involved traveling three times that year for in-person meetings with the mentor and the whole group.

During my one-on-one session at the first in-person meeting, I told the mentor that I had a daily goal of writing for ten minutes every day. He was mildly appalled and spent the rest of that weekend talking about how we can get me up to more writing.

I struggled to make him understand that writing for ten minutes a day — my teeny, tiny goal — was a life-changing-level powerful tool. I wasn’t going to change it, no matter how much I’d paid him for advice.

Because it was working.

What that man struggled to understand was that my teeny-tiny goal was not a stopping point. It was a starting point. A minimum, not a maximum. It wasn’t like I was setting a kitchen timer and stopping mid-word when my ten minutes were up.

A Teeny-Tiny Goal is a Psychological Tool

My ten-minutes-a-day tiny goal was the difference between zero and one. Most days, I write far more than ten minutes. Some of those days, I surprise myself. I don’t want to start, but once I do I get on a roll and words just flow.

But some days? Some days for ten minutes I agonize and it sucks, but I do it because it’s just easier to do the damn thing than it is to break my streak. I can (and do) write for ten minutes even on the busiest day or the most awful day.

I’ve written for ten minutes sitting in a hospital room with family members. I’ve written for ten minutes with Norovirus. I wrote for ten minutes on the day my youngest daughter was born, fifteen years ago. I have no found a day, so far, that was so difficult that I had to break my streak.

Your Teeny-Tiny Goal is Your Tiniest Job

I like to think of my tiny goal as the atom of my writing business. Basically, it isn’t really any more than a solid daily writing habit.

I have a long, long, long standing goal of writing for at least 10 minutes per day on my work-in-progress novel. But I use the same tiny goal for other writing projects as well.

For instance, if I’m struggling with blogging and need to reinstate that habit, I might institute a goal of working for ten minutes at the end of my day on tomorrow’s blog post.

I know myself well enough to know that if I have a blog post started, I’m far more likely to finish it, rather than just decide to skip blogging for the day.

If I do that for a month or so, I’ll find myself back in the habit of regular blogging and won’t need to make myself do it every night anymore.

Teeny-Tiny Goals for Non-Deadline Jobs

Very small goals are an excellent tool for jobs where you don’t have an external deadline.

For instance, if you have a freelance writing job, you probably have an editor who expects you to turn in a piece at a specific time. Your writer brain accepts that you’re going to have to do that work and you might not need a tiny goal for it at all.

But if you’re writing a novel or blog posts that don’t have an editor waiting on them, it can be a lot harder to keep to a schedule. That’s where teeny-tiny goals shine the brightest.

They encourage you to respect your writing business the way you’d respect anyone else’s business, if you were working for them. And they keep those long projects, that you might have to work on for a long time without getting much feedback or reward, top of mind since you’re touching them daily.

Teeny-Tiny Goals Lead to a Daily Habit

I can’t imagine writing a post advising you to show up at a job working for someone else every single day. Or even getting into the habit of doing almost any kind of work every day.

Like, if you were an accountant, I probably wouldn’t work this hard to convince you to do instill a client bookkeeping habit.

And to be honest, if the entirety of your writing business involves writing copy for other people or that sort of thing, then having regular work hours that involve entire days off, is probably a good thing.

But for lots of us, writing is more than a job. It’s a passion. It’s at least half hobby. And if that sounds like you, then I really do think that a daily writing habit is a good idea.

Because writing is also really hard. And if you’re doing writing that doesn’t earn you any money (yet) then it’s so easy to let it slip. You look up one day and realize you haven’t worked on your novel or written a blog post or a poem or whatever in months.

Some days, I literally only spend ten minutes working on my novel. That’s my baseline minimum. I get full-credit for the day if I spend ten minutes making forward progress. And I get that full credit no matter how many days in a row I go between writing for longer than ten minutes.

As a result, I’ve written a book a year for fifteen years. I’ve written thousands of blog posts. I’ve built a legitimate business around my writing.

Set Yourself Up for Success

It’s one thing to decide you want a daily writing habit and another entirely to actually develop one.

Here are some ideas that I hope will help.

Start With a Project

This is a part of the teeny-tiny goal idea that it took me a long time to figure out I actually have to articulate. Tiny goals work best when they are tied to a specific project. So pick one — mine is usually the novel I’m working on, but sometimes I use them for blogging projects, too.

The goal is to work for a few minutes a day on the same project.

Choose the Right Teeny-Tiny Goal

My best advice for choosing your tiny goal is to pick one that’s easier to keep than it is to break. For me, that’s ten minutes a day. If you find yourself routinely not writing for ten minutes a day, make it smaller. Even if you have to go all the way down to one minute or even one sentence a day.

You don’t need to make your goal bigger — even if you’re exceeding it every day. Remember, your teeny-tiny goal is your fallback. It’s the bare minimum. It should be very small. So small that it almost seems ridiculous.

Remember it’s About Starting

Your teeny-tiny goal isn’t about finishing, even though I promise you that if you make one and stick to it, you will finish your projects with more consistency. But really? This goal is about getting started every day. It’s about word one.

Use Your FRED

I wrote yesterday about FRED — my favorite writing accountability tool. Basically, just get a calendar and give yourself a star for every day that meet your tiny goal.

Log Your Work

At the end of your writing session, jot down what you worked on. Your word count, the blog post you wrote, the project you worked on. There’s real magic in seeing how your work stacks up into something significant.

Same Time Every Day

If you’re struggling to develop a daily writing habit, I highly recommend scheduling it the same way you’d schedule working for someone else. This is your job, after all. Showing up at the same time every day can really help you when you’re first developing that habit.

Use a Timer

If it helps, especially in the beginning, use a timer. I like using one on my phone that doesn’t make enough noise to distract me if I’m on a roll. Sometimes I’ll just keep resetting it to see how many ten minute blocks I can get in.

Go Ahead — Make a Teeny-Tiny Goal

Pick a project and then choose a teeny-tiny goal to help you finish it. You can start with ten minutes a day to see if it works as well for you as it does for me. If it doesn’t and you find yourself skipping days, make it smaller.

Create your own daily writing habit.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation, Rebel Nation, The Astonishing Maybe, and Center of Gravity. She is the original Ninja Writer.