All writers have goals, whether it be publishing their book or just finishing their story. Many of the writers I know also set monthly goals, subdivided into daily goals. For some, it’s an accountability measure, a way to make sure that they write every day. Then, there are always the competitive bunch that always strive to win. Regardless of which category you fall into, OWL will let you set a monthly goal for writing and/or editing. Although you can do both for any month, I recommend sticking with one or the other to help with focus.

Adding a goal is easy and will take you mere seconds. First of all, navigate over to the goal’s screen through the menu on the left. Start off by clicking the red plus button in the bottom corner.

Once the popup window appears, add a date for the month you want to add a goal for. By default, the current month will be populated.

Although you can enter any date, it will always save as the first day of that month. You can enter goals for prior months as well, if you have old writing data you want to add.

Then, select the activity and your goal for the month. Word count is the goal for writing while the number of hours is the goal for editing. A word count may be 15000 words per month while the editing goal may be 30 hours per month.

Click Add Goal and you’re done. The goal will show up in the list of goals.

In the above sample, you can see the month for each goal, the target, whether it be words or hours and then progress towards that goal. The activity for each goal is listed on the very right.

And that’s that. The next post will cover how to add an activity and how to better understand how to see how much you have left until you reach your goal, as well as a bit about how you’re doing.