Yup, I’ll be the first to admit it. I failed. Less a month into the new year, I have failed to meet my goals.

Two weeks ago, we had our first meeting of 2010. We went around the table and took turns at what we wanted to accomplish for the year with our writing. Some of our goals are ambitious, but all are obtainable.  Mine probably more so than some. 

So you may ask what my goals were for 2010. Well, that’s simple. I just wanted to finish a first draft done by the end of June. I figure to accomplish this I needed to write at least 3-5 pages a day.  

I could lie and say that I ‘m on track to meet my overall goal, but I can’t. I really have no excuse. I have made a schedule for my days, every morning as an attempt to see all my tasks for the day. Writing is on there, always at the end of the day. 

Well, truth be told, writing is on the schedule for most of the day. I mean, I do try to blog every day. I have lots of drafts for several blogs I own or ghost for. Somehow, with the research involved and the mental energy it takes to put together a well informed post always takes longer than you would expect. 

If I’m not drafting a post, I’m tweaking the back-end to bring traffic to our blogs. Amazingly there are pages upon pages about what works, what doesn’t, what to do, and what to put on the blog. I read other blogs and make comments and before I know it I’m lost in the blogosphere on one tangent after another. 

So why did I fail? I failed because I’m easily distracted, because I am not sticking to my schedule that I outlined every morning, because I’m not focused on my goals. 

To this end, I did manage to complete one major task today. I interviewed a fellow writer for this blog to be posted in the next couple of days. 

We discussed organization, motivation, and goals. I can’t wait to put the post together. While I saw a lot of similarities in our writing styles and our respective writing groups, I learned a lot about motivation and sticking with your goals, no matter what. 

With any inner gumption on my part, my next post will be, I DID NOT Fail! Oh, wait, that’ll be the post after next, I got the interview to put together first. 

Do you have problems writing or meeting your goals?  If so, how do you combat that? What works for you to get back into the groove?