Normally I set goals for a nights work, such as completing india, or last night completing china, or the night before that completing europe.
As of now I'm sort of planning to do Canada and then some of africa, then the rest of africa and northern europe, then indochina and oceania, and then south america possibly over a few days.
That is true, although I didn't have that in mind when I actually decided to do it. What I had in mind was that since I had a 6 million minimum population for a country getting a territory it also made sense to also require 0.6 or more towards the next million to get an additional territory.
Nice catch, although i'm actually not using the mercator projection. I'm using a map projection called "Robinson", which is what's called a Pseudocylindrical Compromise projection, as opposed to mercator which is a Cylindrical Equidistant projection. You can see the spatial layout of Robinson using this image (similar to the one you linked for mercator):