The One With the Not-So-Effective Writing Goals

What ‘Friends’ Taught Me About Setting Goals and Sticking to Them

There’s an episode of “Friends” where Joey decides to write a play after he gets rejected for an acting gig. Ross challenges him and Joey jumps on the idea. Ross even helps Joey come up with a writing schedule. 

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His first challenge is to come up with his main character’s name. The next day, as Chandler tries to distract him with their new game, fireball, Joey struggles to produce the five pages he needs to keep him on Ross’s schedule.

Right away we learn a few things about goal setting. Your goal can’t be too small. Just coming up with a character’s name probably wasn’t tough enough of a task for Joey on that first day. Maybe Ross could have helped Joey brainstorm not just a name for his main character, but some key aspects of the character’s personality that would drive the plot of his play.

Or maybe they could have even worked through the plot itself — line up the central conflict, the main character’s driving force. Plan out a couple of the guiding elements of the plot and work through some of the five Ws: who, what, when, where and why.

Joey’s playwriting pretty quickly gets out of hand, and I don’t think it’s just because of how much fun fireball is. Joey needs to write five pages a day to keep up with Ross’s schedule, and that feels like a big jump to make for someone who, we assume, has never written a play before.

So that’s the next thing we learn about goal setting as a writer: make the goal achievable! Ross set Joey up to fail by making him launch into five pages a day. They could have started with one, then when Joey was in a habit of regular, daily writing, step it up to two or three.

Now, certainly I know this is all for comedic effect, and it’s all meant to say more about Ross — who’s on a forced sabbatical because of his turkey sandwich meltdown. But after a recent rewatch of this episode, I challenged myself to work on solidifying a daily habit, with a simple goal of writing a minimum of 10 minutes a day. 

Every day I reached my goal, I marked an X on a calendar square. It felt great to see the dates pile up and I felt my confidence grow a little bit more every time.

So set the timer for 10 minutes, and get to writing. And then unhook the smoke detectors and go play some fireball!*

*Don’t play fireball. I’m a firefighter. Please, don’t play fireball.