Why You Need to Daydream in Addition to Defining SMART Goals

Especially when you are an author

SMART goals

If you are an author — regardless of being an aspiring or accomplished one — you want to publish your work. It can be as short as an article or an essay or as long as a series of novels.

And either you want to publish traditionally (that could be roughly understood as brought out by someone else) or through self-publishing (= by you), you, as an author, is also an entrepreneur. You own a writing business, even if you might not have registered it as such.

As an entrepreneur, you need to define your goals. Many recommend the goals to be SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

There are numerous pros and cons to SMART goals reported on various media. Here is one of the search results:

You would agree that the more concrete your goals are, the better you will know which direction to take and what small and steady steps you can take toward them. You will also know better what intermediate goals will lead to that “final” one.

But if you have looked at the search result above, you might have seen that many of the articles there argue that SMART goals alone are not enough. They might even be impractical.

Here is why.

But concentrating on the details, you might forget the big picture, which is the “why” or the “backstory,” if you will, behind your goal. Why do you want to achieve it? Is it because you want it or is it because you think you want it or because others say it’s right for you?

We often try to leave feelings out of the SMART consideration of goals, forgetting that we need a healthy portion of daydreaming on top of the practicality and specificity.

Daydreaming and how it helps

“Daydreaming is the stream of consciousness that detaches from current external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction. This phenomenon is common in people’s daily life shown by a large-scale study in which participants spend 47% of their waking time on average on daydreaming.” — Wikipedia

This mental detachment from the world around us can lead us to worry and upset, especially when done for a longer time.

But practicing it consciously and intentionally would mean that you listen to your feelings, to what you really want. And if you do so without judgment and with curiosity, this listening to yourself can bring you back to the current moment and the pinnacle of your creative abilities.

Here is an example of such listening told by a highly prolific and acclaimed author, Rachel Aaron, who sets and achieves many of her goals — also when it comes to planning and plotting her novels:

“Every day, while I was writing out my description of what I was going to write …, I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it. I’d look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were obviously what made the scene cool. If I couldn’t find anything to get excited over, then I would change the scene, or get rid of it entirely. I decided then and there that, no matter how useful a scene might be for my plot, boring scenes had no place in my novels.”

— Rachel Aaron, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love (p. 18). Aaron/Bach. Kindle Edition.

Such an “excited” approach works both in fiction and non-fiction — also when making progress in other areas of our lives.

These repeated checks of how excited we are — and, thus, what we really and genuinely want — are essential for us to keep balance and be fully engaged in our lives.

Mind sculpture

There is also another art of beneficial daydreaming.

It is visualizing yourself in the process of writing or any other task you want to accomplish before actually doing it.

If you frown at this idea, then recall all the ideas for your work-in-progress you get when you take a shower or attending to some other tasks in your daily routine.

In those cases, you visualized your successful creative processes involuntarily. But you can do so deliberately too.

There is a term for it. It is called mind sculpture.

“Mind sculpture is one of the simplest of kaizen tools and is a way to melt your mental resistance. I often recommend it to people who struggle with sales and public speaking, though it can work with any kind of fear.

“Mind sculpture grew out of a psychological technique called ‘guided imagery.’ The goal of guided imagery was to help patients improve a physical skill without actually performing the physical act. If a person wanted to improve her speaking ability, for example, she would close her eyes and breathe deeply. When she was in a fully relaxed state, the psychologist would invite her to imagine that she was inside a darkened movie theater, sitting comfortably in front of a blank screen. The patient was then supposed to ‘see’ a movie of herself on the screen, delivering a presentation with panache.”

— Robert Maurer, The Spirit of Kaizen: Creating Lasting Excellence One Small Step at a Time

Robert Maurer recommends practicing mind sculpture in the smallest possible steps every day. He says that even 30 seconds are enough. If you like, you can do it several times a day.

But I’d like to emphasize that if you do it, this practice shouldn’t pose pressure on you, but instead feel like a fun and quick role-playing game.

I realized that I play such a game often as soon as I step away from the article or other piece I want or committed to writing and which “refuses” to be written, and instead do something else.

Words in conclusion

The SMART approach to formulating goals was created to make the goals more manageable and achievable. But somehow, the attempts to do so can make our dreams seem daunting or even not being what we really want.

Without dreaming, visualizing, and observing how we feel about the task at hand, we might never achieve what we cherish — the happy and creative state of flow.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this article, then in addition to the ones referred to above, you might also enjoy these three:

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