DislikedWell put, bbaker.
I have a great plan, dicipline and patience is my main problem. Take yesterday for example. My goal is to make 10 PIPS a day, my trading plan supports it. Yesterday I took 10 PIPS but used many trades to get there (normally I need one). Why? Because I didn't have the dicipline and patience to wait for the right setup. A normal day it take me abouth half an hour (aggreagated time) to get to my 10 PIPS yesterday it took me over 3 hours, which prevented me from doing many other things. Profit/time unit was down a lot....Ignored
My goal is not the number of pips I make in a day, but the number of trades I make a day. My lack of discipline meant I was overtrading and spending far too much time pip watching!
In my day trading plan I have no pip targets, but I will now limit myself to 2 trades per day. This means I am forced to wait for the right setup. If I lose on both trades, I will shutdown my computer and I will walk away and I will not trade until the following day. This is going to be hard, but I will have to force myself. This is where discipline will come in and this is what I will have to learn.
On the other hand, if I have 2 winning trades, I will consider myself to be in tune with the market on that day and I will allow myself another trade. If that loses, I stop with 2 winners and 1 loser. If it is a winner, I will have another trade to the maximum of 5, so that on my best day of trading I will have a maximum of 5 winners, no more!
My other rule in day trading is that I can only trade if the Risk/Reward ratio is 1:3 otherwise I am not entering this trade and I will wait for another setup. This also means that in one week, I can have 7 losing trades and 3 winning trades and I will still be in the green for the week.
My final rule is that I am only allowed to day trade two currency pairs, EU and GU. These are MY rules and they are in MY trading plan.
What I am trying to show you is that pip targets are not always the best targets, exactly for those reasons that you mentioned in your post.
I wish you every success with your trading and whatever your rules are in your trading plan, stick to them!