Beth Groundwater’s debut mystery, A REAL BASKET CASE, was released in March, 2007 to good reviews from Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and other national publications. Also, she has published seven short stories, including one in Wild Blue Yonder, Frontier Airlines’ in-flight magazine, and one which was translated into Farsi. She is an active member of MWA, Sisters in Crime, Pikes Peak Writers, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Feel free to stop by her blog to learn more about her.

Howdy! I’m here to talk about online goal-setting groups and how they can help you meet your goals in life, be they writing-related or not. I’m a member of two writing-based goal-setting groups, and I recently joined a “healthy living” goal-setting group. I knew I needed some outside help to get rid of the extra pounds I packed on while eating out on the road during my spring promotion blitz for my debut mystery, A REAL BASKET CASE. So, here’s how an online goal-setting group can keep YOU from becoming a real basket case!

First, find a small group of like-minded buddies with similar goals. These can be folks you’ve met in person or that you only know online through email discussion loops, communities, chats, etc. Agree to check in online with each other via a group email message once a week (usually on the weekend) to 1) set a weekly goal for the next week and 2) evaluate how you did on last week’s goal. Pick a group of folks you can trust, because total honesty is required! Then break down your large goal, like lose 20 pounds or write a novel, into small weekly chunks, like lose 1 pound or write 10 pages. Then post that goal for the others to see.

It’s amazing how effective this simple process is. First, by posting a goal you’re forced to think about what you can accomplish in the coming week and to make a plan for doing it. Then, a powerful guilt effect kicks in a few days before report-in time if you haven’t accomplished your weekly goal yet. There have been many Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons I’ve spent madly writing to make my posted page-count goal before the Sunday report-in day! But hey, HOW you accomplish your weekly goal is not as important as the fact that you actually did it. It’s a lot harder to starve myself the last two days of the week, but many times throughout the week I’ve decided not to eat something or I push myself to do that workout because I know my healthy living buddies are watching me—in cyberspace!

And it’s perfectly okay to miss a weekly goal. Admit it to the group, then take a step back and evaluate what went wrong. Did you set a too ambitious goal for a busy week? Did an unexpected crisis come up in some other aspect of your life? Or did you just get lazy? If it’s something that couldn’t be helped, tell your goal buddies about it and reset your weekly goal for the next week. If you need some “cheerleading” from your online buddies to get that butt in the chair and write or out of the chair and exercising, tell them. They’ll be there for you, just as you’ll be there for them. And you’ll all wind up becoming better friends in the process. Good luck with your goals!