by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author

Welcome to the holiday season! Although, if you’re anything like me, you’ve already been neck deep in tinsel and lights since the day after Thanksgiving. I love Christmas. It’s my favorite time of year, but when it’s over, we rush headlong into New Year’s festivities and suddenly we’re back to work again.

Have you ever tried to set goals and make plans on the day you’re back to work after New Year’s? I have. It’s not fun, and it’s not effective either.

I started a new style of planning and goal setting in 2024, and it’s actually served me really well. So I figured maybe it would be useful for others too as we roll into 2025.

I got into bullet journaling in 2017 or so, and it has been the number one resource for keeping myself on track with most of my goals and projects. What I love about bullet journaling is the flexibility it provides you to organize your life and projects in the way that makes the most sense to you.

This has been incredibly helpful for my writing and content strategies this year, especially as I have been in a season of full-time caregiving for my mother who has Alzheimer’s. Did I get everything done that I wanted to get done? No. But I was able to get most of it done, and I was able to track what didn’t get done so that I could roll it forward to next year.

So if you’re looking for a new way to plan, maybe what I’ve learned about time management this year will be of use to you. Everyone is different, so it may not be useful at all. But maybe it will give you some new ideas to try.

Yearly Goal Setting

I start out by identifying the goals I want to focus on in the coming year, both professionally and personally. I try to keep my goals intentionally broad, although they are usually connected to a specific outcome. For example, in 2025 I have three primary goals (three is actually a really good number to aim for):

1. Storytelling
2. Parent Care
3. Personal Health

Each of those goals fits within a specific arena of my life and lends itself to specific projects. Writing books/short stories/articles and publishing them is all part of my goal of storytelling. Completing house projects and investing real time in making sure my parents have a comfortable life is goal two, and goal three includes working for a company and accepting clients that allow me to make a living but also take care of myself.

Some people like to be more specific at this stage, but I find that getting very specific in the overall annual goals causes a lot of stress. I have to start broad and work down to what is specific.

Quarterly Project Setting

After I’ve identified the primary goals, I get specific on the individual projects associated with those goals.

For example, in my Storytelling Goal, I plan to draft two novels, to finish revisions on two manuscripts, and indie publish four books in 2025. The way my writing process works, I usually always have two novels in process while two are being published so that I always have books releasing.

I know that in Quarter 1, I will plan to make revisions on one manuscript and draft a new manuscript. If there’s space (unlikely) I’ll release a book in Quarter 1 as well. But the priority is the revisions. The next priority is the new draft.

Setting priorities within your project list is essential.

Within each Quarter, I aim to have no more than three major projects for each Goal Category. How that breaks down will look something like this:

Q1: Storytelling

1. Revise Manuscript 1
2. Draft Manuscript 2
3. Publish Manuscript 3

Q1: Parent Care

1. Daily Care and Appointments
2. Home Project 1
3. Grocery Shopping and Meal Preparation

Q1: Personal Health

1. Client and Work Projects
2. Regular Daily Movement
3. Social Events

Having nine main projects to complete in three months doesn’t sound like a lot, but believe me—it stacks up. And you’ll notice that I’m still not super specific yet. The next step is when we break it down even further.

Cyclical and Fortnightly Planning

For years, I operated on a monthly planning basis, but I have found recently that I much prefer operating on a Cyclical Basis or a structure that’s based on four weeks exactly rather than a month. It makes planning and executing so much easier to be able to lay out four complete weeks at a time, rather than having to adjust for whether a month ends on a weekend or not.

There are 13 weeks in every quarter, so the way I lay out my cycles in my quarter gives me three four-week cycles plus an extra week, which I use as a Sabbath Week and/or Reset Week. In those weeks I prioritize rest time and household chores, such as cleaning and organizing.

Then, within each cycle, I break down my task lists into fortnights (spans of two weeks each). Throughout 2024, it worked really well for me to look at my schedule in segments of two weeks at a time. This allows me a lot of flexibility in how I approach my projects, primarily because the appointments and meal planning that goes into caring for my parents can be scheduled in advance most of the time.

Work tasks and client projects, as well as my writing goals, can fit in around the daily needs of running the house and caring for my mom. But I have been very intentional about my writing pursuits in 2024, so I know what a realistic daily word count looks like for me. Knowing how many words I can write on a given day (and the length of project I’m writing) helps me know how many manuscripts I can complete, and I can plan accordingly.

For example, if I am drafting one of my superhero adventure novels, I usually aim for the word count to be around 80,000. I plan to write around 5,000 words a day when it comes to fiction (usually I can write twice that, but because of the season of life I’m in, I choose to low-ball the estimate). That means I need a total of 16 days to complete the draft of an 80,000-word novel. However, I rarely have 16 consecutive days in which to write, so those 16 days have to be split up across several weeks and squeezed into writing sessions in between other life stuff. I don’t write on weekends, as Saturday is meal prep and grocery runs, and Sunday is a partial sabbath rest day. Tuesdays are office hours where I work in a coffee shop and meet with colleagues. That leaves Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays to write, which gives me four writing days a week. If I’m caught up on other writing projects, I should (in theory) be able to complete an 80,000 word novel in four weeks with that schedule. However, life rarely goes according to plan, and (again, because of my current life season) I usually double that estimate. So I try to give myself eight weeks to draft an 80,000 word novel.

How that fits into my cyclical planning is very straightforward. If I have eight weeks to write a novel, that leaves me four weeks to revise an edited manuscript as well as publish an already-prepared manuscript.

Of course, this also needs to incorporate my daily tasks as an editor/teacher, as well as the non-stop needs of my mother and the household.

What you savvy indie publishers might notice is that I left something incredibly important out of my planning: Marketing. You’re right. I omitted it. And I did it intentionally because I don’t have time to do it. In 2024, I tried to incorporate marketing strategies and advertisements into my schedule, and I wasn’t able to do it. So that tells me in 2025, I need to hire someone to do it for me.

It’s very important that you prioritize the things in your life that only you are able to do. For authors, that means writing your book. And if your schedule only allows you to write, that means you need to hire out your marketing.

But what if you don’t have the money to hire someone? Well, then it’s time to take a long, hard look at your finances to see where you can tighten your belt. Where can you cut things? And if you don’t find that you can cut anything, just take a breath. Work on your writing. Write the next book. If you have to wait a while before you bring someone on board to help you market, that’s fine. When you do have the funds saved up, think of the backlist you’ll have!

One last thing, all of this has worked for me, and I have designed these processes and systems to function in my life. But what I hope you can take away from this is how you have the power to create a schedule and routine that works best for you.

No one knows your life and your routine and your dreams and goals like you do. Be intentional about how you prioritize them, and get specific about what you want to accomplish. Once you know what steps you need to take, it gets so much easier to actually take them.

A.C. Williams is a coffee-drinking, sushi-eating, story-telling nerd who loves cats, country living, and all things Japanese. Author of more than 20 books, she keeps her fiction readers laughing with wildly imaginative adventures about samurai superheroes, clumsy church secretaries, and goofy malfunctioning androids; her non-fiction readers just laugh at her and the hysterical life experiences she’s survived. If that’s your cup of tea (or coffee), join the fun at www.amycwilliams.com.