Goals Club (formerly known as Deadline Club or Friday Fun Fest) is a very simple structure for encouraging regular creative practice.
My god, Laura, why?!
In the early 2000s, the traditional writing group—5-12 people meeting in person on some sort of schedule to critique 20 or so pages from each of 1-3 members—had stopped working for me. Instead, I wanted a group that:
- supported what had become the most important part of writing for me: daily, intentional practice
- had a decentralized structure where everyone is equally responsible for their own group, vibe, and experience
- was not focussed on feedback or discussion of work
- did not require convening of any kind
Guidelines
Goals Club facilitates and supports the formation of creative habits and encourages immediate progress on creative work.
GC should take no more than 15 minutes a week to do.
Some GC tenets:
- All progress is good
- The most important characteristic of a goal is that it is realistically attainable within a week
- Take your work seriously
- If something isn’t working, change it
- Suspend judgment of yourself and your work (and of those in your group and theirs)
A successful weekly cycle is when you and the people you’ve made a GC agreement with:
- identify a realistic creative goal for the week
- state it in writing to the group by Friday night
- report on goal progress (and set new goals) the next Friday night
That’s it!
Three weeks in a row of missed goals means you’re either not being realistic enough or your life has become so busy that a hiatus is in order. Members are responsible for tracking and responding to their own missed goals.
Advice for Using Goals Club
I’ve been doing GC off and on for 20+ years. Following are some observations, but really the above is the most important stuff.
Get as many people as you can/want to be your deadline holders. Make whatever arrangements you want with them. When you start GC by entering into an agreement with one person , you are not joining a group that already exists, you are creating your own group that might have overlapping members with that other person’s group or it might not. In other words, Sally and Eunju are in each other’s GC circles, but ideally Sally will have other people in their circle who are not in Eunju’s and vice versa. I think it’s important for folks to find and choose the people they are going to do GC with. The people in my circle are people I know well and whose work I’m really invested in personally. They also know my work and care about it.
Pick a clearly defined, quantifiable, and realistic goal, state it in writing, and genuinely try to meet it every week. You can pick the same goal for every week or change your goal every week—it doesn’t matter, as long as you articulate the goal by Friday night and report on your progress the next Friday. Some examples:
- 10.5 sentences a day
- 1 sketch a week
- Take a picture a day
- 20 hours of writing
- Finish chapter 9
- 9,000 words
Your goals might be much larger or much smaller. Your goals may start small and get increasingly more challenging. Your goals may fluctuate wildly based on the demands in your life.
After doing this for many years, one thing I have noticed in myself and others is that goals that are creativity-adjacent have a tendency to delay actual creative progress. I think of creativity-adjacent goals as those where you think “I need to do x, y, and z first before I can start writing/composing/painting.” Examples: “organize my workspace,” “finish that job proposal,” “establish a regular yoga practice,” “clean out my materials area,” “catalog my negatives,” etc. These types of goals are seductive because they feel like they are supporting or enabling your work—and they might very well be. But GC is about moving your actual creative work forward right now. For a writer that means writing. For a painter that means painting, etc. If there are things you feel you need to do before you can focus on your creative work, I’d first ask you to interrogate that feeling to make sure it’s true (it’s often not) and second, if you determine that it is true, I’d recommend getting whatever it is done before committing to GC.
One exception to the above is that I consider goals that are focused on establishing and fostering creative habits to be central to creative work. So if I haven’t been writing regularly for months, a goal like “Sit at my desk for 15 minutes first thing every morning Monday–Friday with my manuscript file open in front of me. I can write during this time or not, but I can’t do anything else, like read the news, look at my phone, or work for other people.” is valid. This kind of goal acknowledges that “Write 15 minutes every day” is not realistic for me yet and that the thing I need to work on is getting my butt in my chair and my brain in front of my work first thing every day.
This is a goal-setting/progress accountability agreement, not a feedback/critique group. We don’t care about what members are creating or how good it is, we care that it is done.
Members can report on the honor system or provide some kind of evidence. You know yourself; choose the method that is really going to hold you accountable for your goals.
When you report, suspend judgment re: your week or your work. If you met your goal, that’s awesome. If you didn’t, you still progressed as much as you progressed and that is also awesome. If you didn’t progress at all, no biggie (it’s just one week after all)—identify what got in the way and think about how to prevent the same thing happening for the next week.
If you’re losing steam, mired in self-doubt, being anti-creative, or otherwise feeling bad about your pursuits, share it aloud or in writing, come up with a solution, change something.
If you find yourself feeling worse-than-neutral on reporting day, something isn’t working and you should talk about it.
FAQs
Does it have to be Friday night?
I chose Friday for my GC to avoid the weekends turning into “cram all the goals in” days–pick whatever day works for you
I don’t understand the way groups are structured.
You are responsible for making your own group. Make your GC agreements with whoever you like, set goals with them, and if those people want to increase the number of people in their GC group, they can do so without increasing the size of your GC group.
Why can’t we just share a group?
You absolutely can if that is what will suit you and the group members best. I selected a decentralized structure because I wanted everyone to be equally invested in building a group for themselves—that means, each person can select the people they want to support and be supported by and there is no “group leader.” I like knowing the work of the people in my group and being really invested in everyone individually because that’s what works for me.
Does it have to be writers?
You can make GC agreements with anyone doing any creative work. Over the years my GC has included one or more writers, painters, photographers, and composers.
Why are the goals such small potatoes? Isn’t ambition important?
I picked a weekly deadline instead of something longer because I wanted a system that aimed for steady, small, and inherently unimpressive progress. The most important characteristic of a goal is that it is attainable. I don’t want to read the goals of one of my GCers and think “wow look at all these ambitious goals!” I want to read them and think, “that is totally doable and realistic considering this person’s life and where they’re at in their creative practice.” That means when you take realistic stock of what your life is like for the coming week, you choose something that you honestly feel you will and can DO. The other thing about a weekly goal is that it makes it easier to build on your successes. Repeatedly keeping your promises to yourself one of the greater benefits of GC.
All that said, if you can write a story a week or a novel in a month, there is nothing stopping you from setting those goals—they are realistic for you!
Why isn’t there a feedback/discussion element to GC?
There is discussion in GC, it’s just focussed on working/progress rather than the work itself. The people in my GC and I talk about what’s going right or wrong with our goals, we talk about adjustments we’ve made or need to make, we talk about why creative work is not going to happen for the coming week, we brainstorm solutions to problems with progress, we talk about how we’re structuring work at a residency, etc. Discussion of work takes time; I wanted something light and easy and that didn’t introduce much drag into people’s very busy lives. GC is not a replacement for a writing group or similar critique/feedback/discussion group, but can be used in tandem with such a thing.