200 Reads per Day: Quantifying My February Goals

I decided to set a goal today: 200 reads on my Vocal articles every day throughout the month of February. If it goes well, I may shoot for 300 next month, 400 the following, and so on and so forth until I’m rolling in more reads than I know to do with. (I mean, I know what I’d do with those reads. I get money per read. I’m gonna pay off my student debt, then donate to some charities, and hopefully finally flee to Europe when I’ve got a vaccine in my body and money in the bank. But that’s neither here nor there. My point is, I have a goal. I presently hold about $18.3k in student debt, and that’s not pleasant, but my present goal is to have it all paid off, and I’m chipping away at it, as are millions of Americans everywhere. Heck, I’ve been making payments since my sophomore year. If I had a spare ten bucks, I’d toss it to my debt and watch it not make a dent. “Better ten dollars now,” said 20-year-old me, “than twenty-five dollars in a few years.” Even if those ten dollars were, at that point, 0.05% of my total loan balance, that was still a 0.05% I would not have to pay back. (Percentages are fun, by the way! If you can break your goal down into percentages, do that. It's great.) But, again, I digress.

My present strategy for goal-setting is: Make it quantifiable, make it cumulative, and make it diverse. If I had defined my writing goal as, “I will write 500 words a day this year,” that would be nice if I could pull it off, but I’m human, and I have an array of good and bad writing days. The goal is diverse, and it’s quantified, but it’s not cumulative. Those 500 words feel like they’re feeding into a daily goal, not a total goal. “I will write an average of 500 words a day this year” is better. It unifies each day, and allows your writing every day to feed into those bad days where you just can’t write. My personal goal this year has been, “I will write an average of 500 words every day this year, totaling to 182,500 words.” I enjoy this greatly. Not only do I have an average goal, but I have an end goal that everything feeds into. Take a look at my “Word Count Wheel.”

Every time I input a wordcount into my log, that white bit gets a little bigger, and that black bit gets a little smaller. But also, take a look at my word count chart.

Obviously, I’ve neglected writing for several days at a time. But, at the same time, that cumulative goal is not unreachable, and if I have one or two good writing sprints, I can make that goal easily. My morale never sinks to the point of quitting because, even if I miss a week or a month, it’s not impossible for me to get back on schedule. Parlance matters. The structuring of the goal and how you’re going to achieve it also matters. Ultimately, you need to build yourself a system where you can forgive yourself for screwing up a little bit.

Anyway, my 6,000,000-Reads goal is enormous, and frankly, I’m a little bit taken aback by how far I have to go. However, if I can make this little goal for February, for 200 reads per day, I can get nearer and nearer to the end and hopefully, by the time I flee to Europe, be debt-free. I’d love to be able to give back. After all, all of you have given me your attention for so long.