New Year, New Goals: How To Set Achievable Goals For Your Writing & Reading In 2026

 New Year, New Goals: How To Set Achievable Goals For Your Writing & Reading In 2026

Hello and welcome to 2026, my fellow readers and writers! 2025 was a great year, but now we look forward to a whole new 365 days that are full of opportunity. But you might be wondering, how do I set goals that stick throughout the year? And today, I’ve made a list of ways to accomplish both your writing and reading goals.

Though, before we start, I would like to note: Everyone has a different method, so some of these might not work as well as others. It’s all about tweaking the ideas to fit your schedule and life.

Setting Goals In General

We’ve all been in a scenario like this: The Writer or Reader’s New Year Resolution. We scribble out our list with things like these: I want to read 100 books this year, or, I’m going to publish a book this year. 

Now, these goals aren’t inherently bad, they’re good, but… how many of us take a look at a goal that big and feel at least a little daunted? A lot of us. Having such a big goal is a good starting point, but it shouldn’t be your only goal.

You should break down your big goals into small goals, and that’s what we’ll be tackling in these next to sections.

Breaking Down Your Reading Goals

For the sake of this example, we’ll stick with the reading goal from above: I want to read 100 books this year. 

Now, of course, you can always jump right into your reading, but then you’ll lose your momentum after reading for eight consecutive days straight and then putting yourself into a slump for the next one and a half months. Trust me, I’ve done something like that before. 

The only caveat to this is, that rare breed of person(I am one of these) who will read a book and a half every day from those 8 consecutive days, and wind up getting to mark off 12 on their 100 book reading goal. If you’re not that kind of person though, ignore that little tidbit.

Now, the method of: books per month. Maybe you have a flexible schedule or enough free time during certain months more than others. With this method, all you need is three numbers: how much free time you have, how long it takes you to finish a book on average, and how many books you have on your goal.

Let’s stick to the 100. If you have around 6 hours of reading time a week, and it takes you about 4 hours to finish a book, then every month, your total of books read will be somewhere around 6 books a month, which amount to 72 books this year. 

Now, if you don’t have that amount of free time, then you’ll probably need to adjust your goal around a little bit. Which is completely okay! 

Let’s do another method for breaking down your reading goals: minutes/hours per day. This goal works great for anyone, since all you have to do is set a certain amount of time that you’re going to read a day. A lot of kids reading programs do this for a reason, you know. It’s simple and easy-to-track, and even 30 minutes a day adds up fast. 

For the sake of giving you a set number, if you read 30 minutes a day, and you take 4 hours to finish a book, you’ll read almost 4 books a month, which may not seem like a lot, but if you’ve got a busy life, that’s pretty good.

Time for my final method for breaking down this reading goal: pages per day. This goal is perfect for anyone who might have sporadic points throughout the day to read, like if you get a 15-minute break and then 27 minutes of reading before you have to make dinner or something. 

For the sake of this example, let's assume there are 350 pages in a book. If you aim to read 30 pages a day, then you’ll be reading 900 pages a month, which is right about 2 and a half books. 

Now, all these numbers from the last two examples might make it seem like reading that 100 books a year is impossible, and that is okay. Some people work regular 9 to 5 jobs and have kids and just can’t find a lot of time to read, while others live on their own and are self-employed. Just because you wrote down 100 doesn’t mean you can’t change your goal to 50, or 70. 

Breaking Down Your Writing Goals

Now, breaking down writing goals is a little more tricky than reading. And that’s simply because every writer’s habits, methods, and the way they do things varies so much from others. Because of that, this example will be one big way to break down your goals, with alternate ways to do so.

Already though, we hit a roadblock. The goal of I want to publish a book this year, is too big. We have to break it down(we’ll be doing a lot of that).

Let’s divide it into three sections: I want to finish my first draft, I want to revise & edit & rewrite my manuscript, I want to get my book published. 

Now, let me tell you the basics of what I’ll be explaining next. The easiest way to break down your goal is to simply take a hatchet to them and chop them up until they’re easier to carry. Instead of taking an entire tree with us, we’ll be taking the kindling and the logs.

Back to those three sections. We’ll start with the first section. I want to finish my first draft. This is, of course, assuming all you have is an idea.

Now you want to chop it into steps that you can follow along with. What entails completing a first draft? Well, you have to create your characters and your world, and if you’re a plotter, your plot, if you’re a discovery writer, your vibes. You need to come up with a word goal and how many words you plan on writing a day…

Look at that! You already have three steps in that one goal! Pre-Writing info, make a word goal, make a word per day goal… it’s actually really simple when we get down to it. 

What about after that? You need to hit 5,000 words, 15,000, 30,000, 60,000, maybe 80,000. So, write 5,000 words, write 15,000 words, 30,000 words, 60,000 words, 80,000 words. And there you have it! You have all the steps necessary for your first goal of I want to finish my first draft. 

Goal number two of edit & revise & rewrite is a little more tricky. We all have our different methods, so I’ll try to keep this breaking down simple.

Well, first of all, you clearly need to come up with an editing plan. Maybe you do read-and-mark up, or you start with a fresh rewrite. After that, maybe you grab your scissors and snip snip away every single scene that isn’t working before you rewrite that. Maybe you get a developmental editor, or you get a group of beta readers. 

Your steps may look a little like this for goal number two: make an editing plan, rewrite, hire a developmental editor, cut away all useless scenes, rewrite again, etc. or maybe it looks more like this: make an editing plan, read-and-mark up, rewrite, rewrite again, get some beta readers, etc. 

Now, for the final goal of get published. I, unfortunately, cannot tell you a sure-fire way to get published for two main reasons. One, I have yet to self or traditionally publish, and two, there’s no guarantee that you can get published traditionally, or be successful self-publishing.

I don’t mean to be discouraging- all I mean to say is, this is the part where you do your research and come up with a plan that fits you so well, someone else wouldn’t be able to use it. Everyone’s road to publishing may look similar, but they’re all bound to be different in some aspects.

Because of that, I will leave it to you to come up with a killer publishing plan that works for you. 

I hope you guys enjoyed reading through my ways of breaking down your reading and writing goals, and I hope you have a great 2026!