Reaching a Goal (and Writing) Backwards

There’s something to be said for looking and planning your life backwards.

You’ve probably heard countless admonitions to make plans and work towards them, and that’s fine advice.

But given recent experiences with my writing, I’d like to suggest that starting at the end and working backward might be a helpful way to figure out what’s truly important and what you really want.

In both writing and life.

As parents, my husband and I had plenty of things we wanted for our children as they grew up: health, happiness, education, a relationship with God.

But it was only a couple years into the chaos, er, family life, that I put together a list of things I wanted the children to accomplish before they left home.

You probably have a similar list, but here are a few of the things I wanted my children to know how to do/

Things to learn before you leave home

• * Cook
• * Do laundry
• *Manage Money
• *Type
• *Swim

Obviously, we added items to this list, but this was the basis and knowing what we wanted them to accomplish, meant we looked for opportunities for them to learn and grow as we went along.

I got behind on the laundry (they didn’t start that until their senior year of high school), but everything else was done in a timely manner.

One day, though, I thought to ask them what they would like to learn before they left home.

Surely they had dreams and desires I might not have thought of.

The oldest one, a dreamer, had a list: “Oh, I want to learn how to ride a horse, learn archery, row a boat . . . . ” and so on.

Number two, a more pragmatic child and younger, thought carefully as he chewed his Cheerios. When he finally spoke, he had only two desires: “I would like to learn how to drive a car and count money.”

I swallowed my laughter while I guaranteed he’d learn those two tasks.

Working backwards–goal to current moment

It was very helpful.

Similarly, if I want to accomplish something, it works better if I know the endpoint.

If I want to finish something by a certain date, I work backward from that date, figuring out what I need to do by specific times along the way

If I want to lose ten pounds by ten weeks from now,  I need to lose a pound a week. ( I trimmed 3500 calories a week out of my diet. It worked.)

I’ve recently been working through a rewrite of my novel. As part of that, I reread the manuscript looking for clues of things I needed to know about how to direct the 100,000+ word book.

I hadn’t read the manuscript for some time.  I enjoyed remembering the story. (It’s amazing how much you forget!)

In the fourth paragraph from the end of the entire book, I found the key to what I sought.

Hallelujah!

Tweetables

Now I know where I’m going, I just have to work backwards and incorporate those themes through the book. Click to Tweet

Knowing where we were headed–our end result–enabled us to make  intelligent changes along the way. Click to Tweet