Planning and meeting your goals!
Planning and meeting your goals...
Do ever wonder how you could get more accomplished in a day, week, or month? I know I do but it is funny because I get asked frequently how I get so much done. Well, I don’t have any secret way other than a process and plan. The PLAN is KEY for me. If I don’t have that I just jump from thing to thing and don’t really accomplish anything. I’m going to share my 5 tips for goal setting and getting stuff done.
1. Have a PLAN. If you don’t have a plan you can’t work towards your goals. Ask yourself what is your big dream? I mean for real, why do you do what you do? Where are you trying to go? Not, to get a book deal, or to sell 100,000 items. Really, why are you doing what you are doing? Example: I am doing what I am doing because I want to live at the ocean one day. I want to wake up and hear the waves and smell the salty air. That is my BIG DREAM. Make sense?
2. Once I know and understand my ‘why’ I can start looking at what I need to do to get there. And I need to enjoy what I am doing to work towards my dream. So, what are those goals? I usually break them down by the bigger goals I need to tackle and then the tasks to make those happen. These ‘Tackle it Goals’ are SMART goals – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely. They may be ‘I want to sell $1,000.00 with Print on Demand by March 1st.’ I can measure that and I can come up with tasks to make that happen.
3. The tasks I come up with for each of my ‘Tackle it Goals’ will break down into recurring tasks and specific tasks. Some tasks will happen on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and some only happen once. For example I know that I am going to put out a Newsletter X times a month, or I need to post to social media daily. I also know that some things will only happen once like adding a resources section to my website. I need to write down every single task I can think of so I can start making a plan. This is a 15 to 30 minute dump session. I set a timer and write down every, single thing I can think of. This happens of course after I have figured out my 2-4 tackle it goals.
4. Now that I have my tasks I can start making a plan. I go through them and mark the daily, weekly and monthly ones, add them to my Click-Up (this is the project management software I am using to manage all my goals and tasks.) Once I have those down then I will start categorizing the remaining tasks by their associated goal and then the general business tasks that remain. Those all go into Click-Up as well in their associated category. See the screen shot below. On the left side I list my folders for each goal plus the daily, weekly, monthly goals.
5. The last thing I do before starting to work my goals is I set deadlines and add time estimates to each of them. This helps tremendously when you are planning your week/month. I know each month how many work hours I have available between taking care of the home, kids, and personal time. One month I may only have 80 hours available to work and another I may have 120 hours. With the time estimates and deadlines I can realistically plan my weeks and days so I don’t get discouraged.
The most important thing to meet your goals is to take the time to plan things out as I describe above. It may be mundane, but it helps SO MUCH! I know from experience and practice. When I take a couple of days to do this, I no longer have to think about what is next. It is all right there ready for me to start tackling!
Want some worksheets to help with the process, CLICK HERE.
Happy Planning! Have questions, submit them and I will be happy to answer.
Here’s another article you may be interested in if you enjoyed this one!
Happy Creating,
