Adjusting a goal that is no longer working

How I worked through wanting to quit my goal of posting weekly on Substack

One of the goals I set for myself this year was to publish weekly on Substack. This went well until the last few weeks, when I hit a wall. I couldn’t think of anything to write and the looming deadline stressed me out. I felt like giving up rather than adhering to this arbitrary goal.

When I started in January, I didn’t have an editorial calendar with all my post topics scheduled out. I didn’t have several articles already written and ready to go so I could stay ahead of schedule. I decided not to take the time to follow this common advice because I knew that if I spent my time preparing instead of actually publishing, my perfectionism and fear would rise up and keep me preparing forever.

So I just started. I had many ideas at first and got ahead of schedule easily. But then sickness and travel caused me to skip writing times, and some articles took longer to write than others. I tried many times to get ahead, but kept failing. I was running after each deadline, always feeling like I was late.

This wasn’t the experience I wanted, which is why I wanted to give up. Instead, I reviewed why I was doing this in the first place.

I made this goal because I wanted to:

1. Desensitize myself from fear of publishing online.

2. Grow my email list to have a larger audience for my fiction and book coaching.

3. Establish a weekly routine to work on newsletters.

4. Avoid having months between sending anything to my list.

After four months, I can say that I accomplished all of those underlying goals. I also found that I genuinely enjoy writing and publishing regularly, and the Substack platform has become a comfortable place to be for me. I didn’t really want to quit Substack. What I wanted to quit was the weekly experience of being behind or late for my deadline.

There were several possible directions I could take with this knowledge:

1. Decide that completing the goal is more important than my discomfort, and re-commit to publishing weekly, whatever it takes.

2. Lower my quality expectations for my posts, so I can write faster and get ahead of schedule.

3. Change the goal to a different publishing frequency, for example, every other week.

None of these options sat well with me. I realized that it was important to me to create a newsletter / Substack routine that felt good for me. That was how I would make this a sustainable habit. Committing to weekly posts whatever it takes would not be sustainable; it would be stressful. Likewise, it didn’t feel good to imagine publishing something I wasn’t proud of just to make the deadline. Changing the goal to every other week seemed the most possible, but I wondered if I would procrastinate writing articles and end up with the same stress.

Then I thought of another option: focus on the process instead of the deadlines. Show up to my scheduled writing times. Publish when I have something ready to publish and not worry about the schedule.

Imagining moving forward with this option, I felt peace and freedom that wasn’t present with the other options. That’s how I knew I found the shift I needed. Deciding based on how the process felt was especially important for me this time because of my priority to establish a sustainable routine.

Moving forward, I’m going to experiment with different types of posts and different schedules. I might post weekly sometimes, and other times I might skip a week or two. And of course, I’ll re-evaluate in a few months to see if this process is still working for me or if I need another shift.

I think it’s important to re-evaluate our goals like this periodically, especially when we notice ourselves falling behind or feeling otherwise unsatisfied with the results. I hope that this example encourages you to re-assess your goals whenever you need to, and give yourself permission to adjust when needed.

This is the kind of work we do in my writers’ accountability group.

At the beginning of each quarter, we set goals, and then each week we check in on those goals, adjusting as needed.

Interested in joining us?

Sign up to receive an invitation to join next quarter’s group.

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Thank you for reading! If you’re new here, I’m Katelin Cummins, a Catholic writer, book coach, gamer, and fantasy fan. If you would like to know more about what I write, check out this post. If you want help planning, writing, or revising your novel or nonfiction book, check out my services on my website.