[free printable!] SMART Goals & Don’t Break the Chain

31 March, 20145 January, 201511 Comments

UPDATE: Links have been updated with a full 2015 calendar!

I don’t really do New Years resolutions in January. Sometimes I set goals for myself, but April is generally my goal-setting month because it’s the month in which I was born. Doesn’t hurt that it starts with April Fool’s Day, so if I make a completely unreasonable goal, I suppose I could change my mind on April 2nd.

Back in January I decided 2014 was THE year for me to once and for all finish the manuscript I’ve been working on. The past few months I’ve been reading up on productivity, attending time-management and goal-setting workshops for artists, and setting short term and long term goals.

There’s a difference between a goal, though, and a SMART goal.

Making SMART Goals

S-Specific

Your goal needs to be specific. “Be a better person” is a good ideal, but not a good goal. “Be a better writer” is more specific, and you can work with it, but let’s try a little harder. How about “Write a novel”? Sure. Let’s take that one.

M-Measurable

“Write a novel”–is that a measurable goal? Why yes it is! Because novels have a beginning, middle, and an end. Let’s choose a measurement so we can make the goal even more specific. “Write a 50,000-word novel.”

A-Achievable

“Be a better person” isn’t a good goal because how will you know when you’ve achieved betterment? You need a goal with an obvious finish line. Something you can cross off a list. Having a goal of writing a 50,000 novel gives you a point to work towards. In this case, the finish line is typing the 50,000th word.

For something to be achievable, it also needs to be realistic. For me, a full-time mother of two young children (who also freelances), writing a 50,000-word novel in the month of November is NOT a realistic goal. (Sorry NaNoWriMo.) But writing 50,000 words over the next few months is realistic. Especially since most of my research is done.

Helpful tip: Don’t attempt an historical novel during NaNoWriMo.

R-Relevant

A SMART goal is relevant. It is important. It is worthwhile. It is meaningful. Are you the right person for the job? Is it a good time in your life to set this goal? Do you have the support necessary to achieve the goal? For me, that means hiring a part-time nanny so that I have a couple of hours every day to devote to writing.

T-Time-bound

Making a time-bound goal means actually writing it down on your calendar and making time for it. It’s setting a deadline. And this is the kicker—it’s choosing to not procrastinate.

I never have a problem coming up with ideas or goals. I have a problem keeping with them. Which is why I’m really excited about “Don’t Break the Chain” motivation.

Don’t Break the Chain

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of “Don’t Break the Chain,” you can read about its background here. It’s easier to turn something into a routine and keep doing it every day than quitting and trying to start back up again. “Don’t Break the Chain” is all about keeping up the momentum.

First, you pick something you can do every single day. Writing. Exercising. Doing the dishes. Choose something relevant. You’ll be bound by time because you have a deadline every 24 hours.

Make it measurable (Ask yourself “How much?” or “For how long?”). Make sure it’s achievable. Be specific.

Say you want to write every day. Will you write for a certain amount of time or will you have a minimum word count? Start small and manageable. It’s better to underestimate yourself than overestimate yourself. One is motivating, the other is debilitating.

If you’re writing just to journal, 300 words each day is a good minimum challenge. Or 15 or 30 minutes.

If you’re trying to put the “progress” into a “work in progress,” then shoot for five hundred, 750, or a thousand words. Or 30 minutes to 2 hours.

If you’re attempting to write a novel in 30 days, your goal will be 1,667 words each day.

Then each day you do that thing, you cross off the day on your calendar. Soon you’ll have a row of X’s. If you skip a day, you break the chain. Don’t break the chain.

Try this for a month, a season, or a year. The longer you go before breaking the chain, the easier it will be to pick up where you left off.

Free Printable Calendar

You can search for other “Don’t Break the Chain” calendars online (Here’s one). For my own, I wanted to combine the chain idea with SMART goals. I’ve got two versions for 2014. The first is an April-December one, shown in the featured photo at the top of the page. The second is a complete ~~2014~~ 2015 year. That one has the conditions for a SMART goal in small print at the bottom.

Click on the thumbnails to download either one! These are for personal or classroom use only. Not for profit use. Enjoy!

April-Dec 2014

I’ve updated the SMART goals and Don’t Break the Chain calendar with a printable calendar for 2015!

**The image is from 2014, but the link is to the 2015 calendar.**

Newbery Medal Winners in Fiction, 1950-1979

20 November, 201316 July, 20142 Comments

Many, many moons ago I gave you a poster of the Newbery Medal Novels from 1980 to 2012. This one:

Download this poster here. Download the new poster below.

It took a really, really long time to make because I had to summarize all these books I’d never read into just 20 words or fewer. It was kind of exhausting, and I got distracted, and I never finished the other posters.

Then I read a handful of the Newbery Medal winners seen above, and several times I thought, “Really? This won the Newbery Medal?”

Life is too short to read you’re not impressed with, so I abandoned my project in the summer and started reading from a bigger pool of novels.

I realize that may come off as really stuck up. But I have high, personal standards for juvenile literature. I liked The Graveyard Book, I enjoyed my re-reads of The Giver, The Westing Game and From the Mixed-Up Files…, and I found Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! interesting. A Wrinkle in Time wasn’t as enjoyable to me as an adult—Calvin was a dear, but Meg, whom I loved as a child, I found to be more annoying, and Charles Wallace was…insufferable. Like, pre-dragon-Eustace-Scrubb insufferable.

Anyway, I got a recent comment on that post asking if I had finished the other posters. Short answer, no. Longer answer, with two kids, part-time jobs, etc., pro bono work gets put at the bottom of my gigantic to-do pile.

BUT, I got that comment, and because I haven’t been blogging much and to demonstrate that I DO listen to your comments (and because I feel bad), I scrambled together and finished part 2 of that poster series tonight. Let me know if you catch typos, because InDesign does not have a reliable spell check, and I am sleep-deprived.

Click the button below to download the Newbery Medal Winners in Fiction, 1950-1979.

A couple other notes:

Not all of the Newbery winners are included. They didn’t all fit! That’s why these are just the novels. Non-fiction and poetry compilations aren’t included. Sorry.
The boxes by the cover images include the date of the award and serve as a check box, so you can keep track of which ones you’ve read.
Since I haven’t read some of these books, the blurb may not be the best representation of the novel.
I haven’t printed this out myself yet. If the images are a bit fuzzy, it’s because I couldn’t find high-res images of the covers.
This is for educational or personal use only. You MAY NOT use these posters for any sort of commercial gain.

Want the books from 1920 to 1949? Let me know! I accept bribery and compliments. Otherwise you’ll have to wait until I get some more spare time, which will hopefully be soon!

Chekov Lists

1 July, 20139 September, 20175 Comments

If you are not of a geeky persuasion and/or have no appreciation for popular culture, you probably won’t appreciate this. But if you know who Pavel Chekov is, then I hope you like and enjoy.

I made a series of geeky to-do / check-off lists for you. I call them…

wait for it…

the CHEKOV LIST. Continue reading →

Fiction Friday: Newbery Medal Winners in Fiction, 1980-2012

18 October, 201216 July, 20149 Comments

Yes! A day in advance! Again!

You know how I mentioned earlier this week that I started a book club reading and rereading Newbery Award Winners? Well, in preparation for the first meeting, I really wanted a poster of the Newbery Award Winners. And I thought it would be even more nice to have a super short description of the book, to jog our minds if we have already read it, or to make us interested in books we maybe never heard of.

Well, those posters they have in libraries are apparently only available to libraries. I tried to make an account as a homeschool—no dice.

Those nice pretty posters also don’t have a blurb about the books. They have the book name, author, date, and cover. I don’t judge a book by its cover, but I do judge a book by its title. Let’s just say The View from Saturday sounded like a kid version of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and why read Sarah, Plain and Tall when you can read something like Julie of the Wolves?

I remember really liking Sarah, Plain and Tall. I don’t remember it being about a mail-order bride.

So I made my own posters. And since I love you all dearly, I’m going to share them with you to download, for free. (Note, the link to download the printable version is near the end of the post)

This is a preview image. Click the link at the bottom of the page to download.

I have to admit, though, that I have a couple of confessions to make. 1) I am no longer any good at math. The Newbery Award gave its first medal in 1922. This year is 2012. That means there are 90 books, right? 2012-1922=90. No, there are 91 books. If you just subtract, you aren’t counting the current year. Problem: my layout was 30 books per page. In lieu of creating a new layout (this was my 3rd or 4th), I decided rather to eliminate from my posters the books that were biographies and the books that were collections of poems. While I might be interested in someday reading A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers (1989), I can honestly say that I have no desire to pick up Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices (1982) after hearing that all of the poems are about insects.

Confession 2) I haven’t read most of these books. Some of them I hadn’t even ever heard of. I think I read mostly Newbery Honors books as a child, with some major exceptions, like The Giver, Number the Stars, and A Wrinkle in Time. So when I went about writing blurbs about the books, I had to read the synopses of the novels from sites like Amazon and Goodreads. I could only fit about 100 characters per novel to keep the posters to a page each. That’s less than a Tweet, and is about 20 words. Try summarizing a book you’ve never read into 20 words or fewer sometime—it’s definitely a head-scratcher.

As much as I enjoyed the challenge (and hope it will help me come up with elevator speeches of my own novels in the future), it is very time-consuming. That’s why I’m going to release one page per week.

So, for today, I give you the Newbery Medal Winners 1980-2012.