I'm nowhere near a finish product, but I've reached some milestones I feel proud of, and this seems the place to share them.
1st: Does anyone else work with clipboards? They're great at keeping a project organized, and I've got one clipboard for each major project I'm involved in (whether that be something creative, or something as mundane and technical as taxes). I try to keep only three clipboards active at a time, so that I won't get swamped. In early February I was able to clear off a programming project, and now I've got an entire clipboard dedicated to a writing project. May sound weird to you, but that's a meaningful accomplishment to me.
2nd: In a place without any room for anything, I managed to clear a small dedicated place for writing. That I have a dedicated place for /anything/ is a small miracle - see "clipboards" above.
3nd: I'm the sort of person who works from an outline. No matter what I do, I need to have the entire project, with a schedule, planned out in advance. These last two weeks I've been working on an outline to my first serious writing project, a short story. That outline is now finished, and sits proudly at the top of its clipboard.
4th: Having the outline finished, I decided to clean the mess that had piled up over the past month. To my great surprise, I found that most of the loose clutter in my living space is now writing related. I guess that's a good thing because it means that I'm working on [procrastinating about] writing more than [procrastinating about] any other project. It also means that I need to get much more organized with my notes.
These are obviously very minor "Goals and Accomplishments", but I feel like I've crossed the threshold from "I'll write a novel someday, before I die" to "clueless amateur writer".
Now for the second part of this post: What kind of writing habits are helpful to you? I've never met anyone else who uses clip-boards like I do, so maybe that suggestion can help some of you. The stereo typical organizational aid for writers seems to be sticky-notes, which in the movies are shown plastered over every flat surface in a writer's apartment. Maybe I should take up that habit; at least then my floor would be clear enough to walk on.
Feel free to answer the question at the end of that paragraph. Most organizational techniques should work regardless of whether you write code or prose (or whatever).
Here's a completely unrelated question for you to answer, too. What does the word "Redemption" mean to you? Answer with a literal definition (as long as it's your personal definition; I can open a dictionary just fine, and that's not the point), how the word makes you feel, what connotations it has for you, or whatever. I've been using the word to describe a specific idea in narrative writing (like 'climax', 'resolution', or 'character development'), and I want to see if my use of the word jives with how other people feel about it; if it doesn't, I'll have to find a more fitting term. After the comments dry up, I'll post a description of how I'm using it.
My definition of Redemption is the sacrifice of your happiness to make up for making someone else unhappy. Kind of an odd description but it works for me.