Micro Goals: The Difference Between “I Should” and “I Did”

I have been trying something new lately and wanted to share it with everyone. I have been setting what I call Micro Goals to get more of my creative work done.

Now every year my wife and I sit down and do our yearly goals. These are things around our creative projects, house projects, travel, and financial goals. This has really helped us make the most of our year and plan. Now most of the time they are general goals, and then we add the details; these work pretty well and have been super useful to us.

I have so many projects for my writing and music that it’s been hard moving them all forward. Sometimes it gets overwhelming to think about all that needs to be done, and none of this includes my 9 t0 5 and household work.

My standard goal is to write and practice a minimum of three times a week. It’s an easy non-specific goal that I know I can keep to myself. For the most part, this works well, and it’s easy enough for me to achieve, and I don’t beat myself up if I don’t write four days or practice five days.

Turns out there’s actually a name for why this kind of goal feels so easy to keep, and why it doesn’t move the needle much. Psychologists Locke and Latham spent 40 years and around 400 studies looking at what makes goals actually work, and one of their clearest findings is that vague goals like “do your best” perform about the same as having no goal at all. “Write or practice three times a week” is basically a “do my best” goal in disguise. It’s easy to say yes to, which is exactly why it’s easy to let slide.

What I am realizing, though, is that the goal is too general, and really three days isn’t enough to get things done in the time lines I would like them to. This is where I decided to try setting some micro goals for the week and even the day.

Setting a Micro Goal

So here is what I did: I am working on the third pass of my novel The Protector. I call it more of an edit than a draft. I made a goal to edit five chapters. If I got through two chapters in a day, great. If I only got through half a chapter in a day, that was great too. The main goal was to have five done by Friday.

The result: I ended up working on the book six days that week and got all five chapter edits by Friday. You see, having a specific purpose and end goal really drove me to complete the work. If I had stuck to my three times a week, I wouldn’t have gotten all five chapters done.

There’s actually a study that mirrors this. Back in the 80s, researchers Bandura and Schunk worked with kids who were behind in math and had basically checked out on the subject. One group was given a goal for each individual session: finish one set of problems today. Another group was given a goal for the whole program: finish everything by the last session, seven sessions away. A third group just got told to work hard and do their best.

The kids working toward the session-by-session goal blew past the other two groups; they learned faster, mastered more, and actually started to enjoy math. (Enjoying Math is hard for me to believe; maybe tolerate math.)

The kids with the big end-of-program goal did no better than the kids with no goal at all. A goal that’s too far away to actually orient your day around just doesn’t function like a goal. Which lines up exactly with what I found with “The Protector.” Editing five chapters by Friday gave me something to aim at every single day. “Finish the third pass eventually” wouldn’t have.

I think defining the work you’re going to do, setting the goal, and saying this is going to be the specific outcome really triggers the brain to go for it. More so than it would if you just say I am going to sit down and work on my novel today. It’s having intent and purpose that seems to be the real game changer here for me.

The thing with creative work, especially writing a novel, is that it takes so long; it’s not something you can finish in an afternoon. With such a long time line, you can feel like you’re never getting anything complete. Using micro goals helps give you the sense of accomplishment that you don’t get daily from writing a large novel, working on a piece of music, painting, making a video or whatever it is that you do.

There’s research specifically on why that feeling of accomplishment matters so much for creative work. Researchers Amabile and Kramer tracked almost 12,000 daily diary entries from people working on creative projects, and found that the single biggest predictor of a good day wasn’t some big breakthrough; it was simply making progress, even a little progress, on work that mattered to them. Not a finished novel. Not a finished album. Just forward motion you could actually feel that day.

That’s the piece a three-times-a-week goal can’t give you. You can “do the goal” and still end the day with nothing you can point to. A micro goal like five chapters, one section, one page gives you a finish line small enough to actually cross, on a timeline short enough to feel it. And the research suggests that feeling isn’t just a nice bonus; it’s what keeps you coming back to a project that’s going to take months, instead of burning out somewhere in the middle.

How to Try It

If any of this sounds like something you want to try, here’s the simplest way I’ve found to start:

So here’s what I’d suggest if you want to try this:

• Pick one project. Not all of them, just one. The novel, the album, the portfolio piece, whatever’s been sitting half-finished.
• Set a micro goal for the week that’s specific enough to know if you hit it. Not “work on it more.” Something like: “edit five chapters,” “finish the bridge section,” “block in three panels.”
• Attach it to a when. If Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday morning, then I open the file and work for 30 minutes. If lunch break, then I write for 20 minutes before I eat. Doesn’t matter what the trigger is, as long as it’s something that actually happens in your day already.
• Let the daily version flex, as I did with my chapters. Some days you’ll do more, some days less. The weekly target is what you’re aiming at; the daily if-then is just what gets you moving.

The three-times-a-week version of me would’ve read this and thought “yeah, that sounds nice” and then not really changed anything. The version of me editing five chapters by Friday didn’t have that option.

I’d defined exactly what done looked like, and I’d built in the daily nudge to get there. That’s the whole shift. Not working harder. Just being specific enough that your brain knows what it’s actually supposed to do today.

Give it a try, or tell me what has worked best for you. I love learning about others’ creative processes.