Specific versus General Goals

I am very good at wishy-washy goal setting.
"I will exercise more"
"I will eat healthily"
"I will write more"
as opposed to
"I will swim once a week to start, and work out 20 minutes every day with hand weights"
"I will reduce the sugar and cream I use in my coffee by making the brew less like paint thinner"
"I will sit to write every single day, three separate times"

Having a specific, attainable goal makes a huge difference mentally.
It's important to have a clean-edged finish line, one that is under your control. When you accomplish that concrete task you can celebrate it, and set the new task. The smaller the tasks, the more celebration, eh?

The BIG goal may be to lose weight, even a specific number of pounds, in the end, but there is no way I can guarantee that I will lose X numbers of pounds per week. I CAN control what I eat, and my time exercising, that will attain the result of lost weight.

I can control how long I spend on writing each day, but not really a consistent quality of output (yet).
I can limit the time spent on tasks that take away from my writing (both fiction and pattern writing) to help attain the goal of ultimately submitting a book for publication.

An online writing friend who has been consistently published for fifteen years writes fresh stuff for three hours in the morning, and does her revising for three hours in the afternoon.
As a fellow morning person, this makes good sense to me, and I am working my way up to that.
For now, I can add five minutes each session to the time spent writing.

One small step at a time still adds up to miles of journeying.