How To Accomplish More By Writing Goals

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As part of your personal success and drive, establishing a clear way forward and vision of what you want to accomplish is crucial. Then you need to find time and start some goal planning.

Goal setting can be a simple and straightforward process. You decide what you want and set a goal that you can measure and time yourself against. Then you plan out how you are going to reach your goal, measure your progress and check that the progress you are making is as expected.

All of that is pretty straightforward and easy to do.

Therefore, Why Does Goal Setting Not Work Out That Way?

For a number of reasons:

1.    We are not clear on what we want to achieve
2.    We set unrealistic goals (like make a $million by the end of the year) or ones that don’t stretch us
3.    We lose motivation and start to procrastinate

When writing your own goals, it’s fundamental that every goal you write must be realistic and readily achievable, given an appropriate amount of time and resources.  For example, as I said above, setting a goal to earn $1m by the end of the year (assuming you are not earning anywhere near that today) is probably unrealistic. On the other hand, setting a goal to increase your monthly earnings by 1% may be too easy to achieve.

Break Down The Goal Into Manageable Chunks

Once you’ve written a goal you believe you can achieve (with a little hard work, i.e. it is stretching you), the next step is to break the goal down into smaller, manageable chunks / tasks. You can then add completion dates for each of these smaller, manageable tasks.

So, you could end up with the overall goal plus monthly, weekly and daily tasks. Each daily task is moving you towards your weekly tasks, and your weekly task is moving you towards achieving your monthly tasks and so on.

Depending on how far into the future your goals are planned for, it’s sensible to schedule regular progress reviews. I would recommend at least monthly.  For example, the first day of every month, you review your progress so far to-date, and make any necessary adjustments to your tasks/plans. That way you will know if you are still on track to meet your goals. A simple spreadsheet will suffice.

Here’s a powerful tip:

I have seen people have the excuse, ”I spent all my time planning and had no time for doing anything else” Don’t fall into that category. Don’t spend all your time planning and tweaking. You must do things and take action that moves you towards achieving your goals.

Expect The Unexpected When It Comes To Reaching Your Goals

Above we mentioned 3 reasons why goal setting sometimes doesn’t work but those 3 reasons are all in your control.

This next reason isn’t.

The ‘thing’ that happens that just isn’t planned. The unexpected.

Something will turn up that will knock you off plan. It might be a simple thing, like your car breaks down and you have to spend time getting it fixed or you fall ill. These things are thrown in to test you!

The unexpected should be expected, you will simply need to identify some way to overcome it and find time for it.

In Which Areas Should You Set Goals?

One more thing, try and have several goals covering your career (or business), health, relationships, money and fun.

Are you happy with the goals you have set yourself?

Put aside the next 30 minutes, start some goal planning to help you reach your goals, you’ll be amazed how inspirational it can be.