4 Strategies For Creating Weekly Goals To Keep You Focused This New Year

With the arrival of a New Year, it’s normal to start thinking along the lines of making goals for ourselves. The problem for many of us is that most of our goals tend to be rather large and unwieldy – But having big goals is good!

The problem becomes how to accomplish them. We often tend to think about the big picture and forget about the little details that actually need to be done for those big lofty goals that we have.

As has been said for years, “the devil is in the details” (The source of this idiom was “God is in the details”.

Regardless of which version of the phrase you prefer to use, details are extremely important). Knowing what the details are and then managing them effectively can be paramount to success.

Now Is The Time!

Our great goals seem too big to manage and overwhelm us to the point that, although we do not necessarily forget them or give up on them, we table them and say to ourselves that we will do something about them when we have more time. No! We must stop saying this to ourselves. Now is the time. If we keep putting off our goals for another day, something will always come up that derails our plans for working on our goals. Again, now is the time!

Do not overly stress about the time that you need to make for your goals. It will require effort on your part but for just about all of us it is possible to start working towards a worthwhile goal, when we put our minds to it. And anyway, big lofty goals are the best sort of goals to make, since they will often mark significant, positive change in your life. On the other hand it can be true that it is sometimes hard to know where to start when it comes time to realize and start acting on them. There is a way to solve this.

The trick is to figure out the way to break down these big goals into something more manageable. Instead of focusing entirely on the final destination, you’ll find it much easier to get where you want to go if you look at what you can do on a daily and weekly basis without letting yourself wander too far past that if you’re going to stay focused.

Check Out These Tips On How To Do Just That:

1) Start At The Beginning Of Each Week

One idea on when to start: Goals should always be created at the beginning of each new week, consider Monday mornings. Why? Typically, this is because it’s the day when both optimism and enthusiasm is hopefully at its highest. Besides, what better day to figure out your week than on the first day? Wake up an hour early Monday morning and use the time for your benefit.

An Alternative Idea: Sunday evenings, before you go to sleep. Sit down for an hour with no distractions and as outlined above and plan your week ahead.

2) Check Your Measurements

What do your goals look like? Your goals need to have a metric attached to them – Your goals need to be measurable. Consider dates and times or quantity. Consider how much or how many of what needs to be done and when a goal should be completed by.

Even if the direct result of a goal is out of your control, having a metric attached the goal will be motivating for you. Knowing that a result is measured will help keep you on track for you to be doing the things that need to be done to complete the goal.

If you can’t measure the goal then you really haven’t figured them out yet. This is because it’s absolutely impossible to know where you stand if there’s no clear beginning or endpoint. So instead of ‘clearing your in-box before lunch’ (an impossible task because new emails will always show up), tell yourself you’re going to answer a dozen emails before noon.

Of course make your measurements realistic, but challenging at the same time. If you can easily handle the 12 emails before lunch, and your in-box is still a mess, then increase the number. Your beginning of the week review on Sunday nights or Monday mornings will be the time that you can use to figure it out.

If your goals are not being met on a consistent basis, they probably need to be further broken down or if they already are, then either you need to be more disciplined with your actions or you just need to scale back the metrics of those weekly goals that you are missing out on completing.

Pace Yourself

Doing as much as you can is important, of course, but killing yourself or destroying your motivation by asking too much of yourself will not be beneficial and will more than likely result in you giving up. This is the absolute last thing that should happen. Never give up!

Get stuff done, yes. But your weekly goals need to be real, manageable, challenging, but with effort, attainable. Ideally you are looking for a groove or flow to get into where you are accomplishing things as if without even thinking about them as you do them. And then see if you can increase your weekly load as you progress.

When you start, you can start with small numbers but as you progress increase the number of what you are doing as the weeks progress. Overtime you will find the reasonable but challenging amount that keeps you moving forward on regular basis.

3) Use Your Time Wisely

This is more than just time management. You need to understand more than just your schedule. If you have any insight into your best work times, then you will accomplish far more than you ever thought possible.

Think about it this way: If you’re a morning person, then you should be working on projects requiring a lot of heavy thought then. If you’re not a morning person, then maybe your schedule should be more angled toward tasks requiring less concentration until you hit your peak hours.

Try scheduling blocks of similar tasks into the time of day when you know you’ll get the most out of them for the most success.

Bundle Your Routine Tasks

Easily done mundane tasks should be grouped together and done once per week or just every few days. For example taking care of your personal bills and bank account review can be done once per week. Save the bills in a pile that you know where or what it is or as a folder in your in-box and take care of them all at once and only in your allotted time block.

Email Tip: Create rules for your in-box so that specific emails are sent to relevant folders for you to review when your blocked time for that folder comes up.

4) Friday Analysis

So how did you do? At the end of the week, take a little time to look back on the week.

Ask yourself several questions and more importantly, find and apply your answers:

Were you able to accomplish what you needed to?
What roadblocks got in your way?
How might you have better used your time?
What successes can you celebrate?
What progress did you make toward your goal?

The answers will give you the information you need to help plan your next week. Make note of your discoveries and apply them when you set out your schedule following Sunday or Monday.

Section Conclusion

The first few weeks will be challenging, but as you progress, as you become more use to your weekly goal system it will become easier as you go. After a while you will wonder why you had not implemented this plan for yourself before.

8 Vital Tips for Crushing Your Goals In The New Year

What’s The Plan? Do You Have A Plan?

We all hit the New Year running, with the best of intentions to achieve great things. Actually, crushing those goals though can be a challenge. Especially if you feel like your track record in the past hasn’t been great.

The good news is, it’s a brand-new year. You’re starting fresh, and the past doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. The key to making this your best year ever lies in these six vital tips.

1) What Did You Expect to Happen?

You start with an honest assessment of what you’ve done (or not done) before. If you haven’t been meeting your goals, you might want to check your expectations, especially if you’ve been looking at ‘overnight success’ stories as your inspiration. Remember, those ‘inspiring tales’ quite often ignore all of the hard work going on in the background required to create that success. With this in mind, ask yourself what’s reasonable when you set your goals.

What can you do on an hourly, daily and weekly basis to work on your goals and then eventually achieve them?

2) What’s Working?

The focus of your thoughts is more important than you think. If you start obsessing on the mistakes and failures along the way, you’re guaranteed not to make any forward progress. Instead, check your self-talk with a new focus on the positive. Tell yourself about your successes instead. Remind yourself of everything you’ve done right thus far. Take failure as lessons to be learned, not as goal killing roadblocks.

Learn from mistakes and incorporate your knowledge into the actions that you do as you work towards achieving your goals.

When you review your performance be sure to note what did work. When something you did worked try to figure out how to do the same or similar things for the time when something didn’t work and see how you may be able to change what you did.

3) Write Down The Good Stuff Too! Journal Anyone?

Why is it so easy to remember what went wrong while successes drift past, soon forgotten? It seems that our brains are wired for us to remember only the “bad things”. Think of it as a our brain just doing its job to protect us and keep us alive. One main purpose of our brain is self-preservation. As a simple example from the Adam Sandler movie, Hotel Transylvania, “Fire, bad!” Knowing that fire is bad and having it in the forefront of our minds helps to keep us alive.

Your Primal Brain Is Just Doing Its Job

The primal part of our brain does seem to sabotage our efforts to achieve success and this is why success can be such a challenge for so many of us. This is also why to achieve success it requires conscious work and effort to in order to overcome our primal brain. This is also why we should not be too hard on ourselves when we may not achieve our goals.

Evolutionarily speaking, our primal brain has been with us for a long time and the part of our brain that deals with rational thought is a relatively new function of our brain. With this in mind, we can cut ourselves some slack, but continue working on what needs to be done.

Writing out your goals is crucial for success and must be done. However, the key here is to keep a log and also write down when things go right. Keeping a journal of your achievements becomes more than a written record of your work. This is a tool you can pull out, again and again, to encourage you in the year to come. Nothing inspires more than the reminder that you got it right before and can get it right again.

4) Clear Your Mind

As stated above, sometimes it’s our own brain working against us. We get cynical about the past, about what we’re doing today, and where we’re going. Practicing mindfulness clears your mind of negative clutter and helps you to center yourself again so you can move forward without dragging around negative baggage.

**5) What Are Your “Fast Five”?**

When you are doing your weekly review, for every day of the upcoming week figure out at least five must do things that you can do to get you closer to your goal. These shouldn’t be big things, but small, relatively simple to accomplish tasks. When they are done, being able to cross these items off of the list every single day will help to keep you focused, motivated and push you along in surprising ways. You’ll be at your goal before you know it.

6) Dare To Accomplish Great Things

Sometimes you just need to take a chance. Dream big. Take a leap of faith. It’s an awesome feeling when you have put in the work and you are able to propel yourself to new heights.

The actions that you need to take to achieving your goals should be simple and manageable. But when they add up the result can be much greater than the efforts that you put in. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is where and how the “magic” happens when following a goal achievement plan. Day by day, you continue to plow ahead and then one day you are able to look back and really see and appreciate the fruits of your labor.

7) Sacrifice

Success will mean sacrifice and for achieving our goals, sacrifice will mean putting off something today for “a better tomorrow”. These days, it is far too easy to live (find yourself stuck) in the moment, but ask yourself this, are you really living?

Of course we need to be present in our lives and be in the moment as much as we can be. But being present and living in the moment needs to be done with our heads up and our eyes open looking forward to the future.

Living in the moment is not at all an excuse to ignore our future. Thinking about the future that we want to have and then doing the things to take us to that future is the only way to achieve success.

You must have a plan and you must work the plan. And that means that you must delay some gratification today for your “better” tomorrow.

8) Believe That You Can

You must start with the belief that you can do things that matter. Start only with that. For right now, you do not even need to believe in yourself. Just start doing things. The results will happen and when they do, the belief in yourself will also happen.

Lead your self-beliefs by taking proper actions. Do first. Believe in your goals and the actions that are derived from them. The belief in yourself will come.

What is the mantra of Nike? “Just Do It!”

Section Conclusion.

Simple: Do these 8 things and crush this New Year and every year afterwards! Your life can be awesome.

8 Real Benefits To Setting Goals For The New Year

Why even bother setting goals for yourself? It’s a New Year. Big deal. Everyone sets out goals, but who really reaches them? It kind of makes you wonder what the point of it all is.

The thing is these goals that we set for ourselves are more important than you think. In fact, there are several benefits to setting goals for the new year, some of which just might surprise you.

1) Stuff Just Happens

It’s hard to accomplish anything when you’re not really setting out to get things done. Unless you’re incredibly lucky, you probably won’t get far at all.

Yes, luck can play a role too, but in order to allow Lady Luck just the possibility to enter your life, you need to be prepared for her, after all, “Chance favors the prepared”.

Now think about this: Not only will goal setting make things happen, but they’re also going to happen a whole lot faster than they ever would if you weren’t directing your energies right at them.

When you are actually doing things – when you are doing the right things – somehow good things seem to happen on their own. Call it what you want, Karma, the universe responding to you, God or some other “divine presence”, when you are doing good things, more good seems to follow.

2) You Feel Better

Goals have a funny way of making you feel better about yourself. Don’t believe it? Believe the many studies which have proven people who make goals feel better about themselves. In fact, it’s been shown the closer people get to their goals, the better they feel. Why? The brain rewards this kind of positive activity with a jolt of dopamine when you do.

By the way, when you do finally achieve your goals, guess what? It’s simply the time for you to make new goals! We are creatures that constantly need something worthwhile to do. You want success in life? Keep on keeping on!

3) You Find Your Purpose

Why are you here? If you have a goal you probably know the answer to the question. Having a higher purpose in your life creates contentment and fulfillment in a way few other things if anything at all will. Having a good and worthwhile goal and working towards it gives you the reason to get out of bed each morning and provides you with the reason for your existence.

4) You Focus More

Knowing where you are going means you know what you’re aiming for when you sit down to get the work done. With your focus honed your activity is directed in a way to make you more successful in what you set out to do. You can only get somewhere when you know where you are headed.

5) It Kills Procrastination

There’s no time like the right here, right now when you have something important to do. Why put off until tomorrow what you can’t wait to get at today? Besides, it’s impossible to be distracted when you’re enjoying the hyper-focus we just talked about in the previous benefit.

6) You Make Better Use of Your Time

You’ve got stuff to do and no time to waste doing it. People with goals start paying closer attention to how they’re spending their time and then find the ways to waste less of it. Our days are numbered. What are you doing with you time?.

7) Decisions Become Easier to Make

Anytime a choice comes up, it’s going to be weighed in light of the goal you’ve set. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to know just what to do under those circumstances.

People with goals are able to prioritize the many distractions that pop up in life and make the wise choices on how to handle and manage them.

8) Reduces Stress

Having goals makes for clear vision. With having the direction that comes from knowing what you want to do you are less likely to stress over the small stuff. After all, you’ve got your plan, you’re already set and you know what needs to be done. Making the wise choices becomes guilt free – no more or, at least, significantly lowered guilty feelings so your stress levels are reduced. When it is needed, and it will be needed, saying no to some things will be done with a clear conscience.

Conclusion

With so many positive benefits to setting goals, the choice that you need to make should be straightforward and obvious to you. If you have not already, jump back up to the top of this article and start making the time to take control and ownership of the year to come by creating a plan that is right for you. Doing so will add so much to your life that as hard as it can be, you’ll be glad that you did!

What do you want to accomplish this year?