One tip I’ve gotten recently that I wanted to pass on to anyone reading this, regarding becoming more successful, is setting explicit goals for yourself. I’ve found that just the simple act of writing down what I want to accomplish has begun to massively increase my focus on improving myself. Here’s something to try; it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to get started and might help you too.
- Think about 10 goals you want to accomplish in the next year. Write/type them down somewhere. These can be anything – work, personal life, whatever – and even goals that seem outrageously difficult but be honest. Write down things you really want to do.
- Look over your 10 goals again and prioritize them with your most important goal at the top.
- Take your top goal and break it down into sub-tasks. Still looks pretty hard to accomplish, right? If not, great! You can do it quickly. If you’re like me though most of your goals seem like they are far off or may be unclear on exactly how to reach them.
- If your sub-tasks are still big and seem hard to accomplish, repeat step 3 over and over until your sub-tasks are clear and can be completed in a short amount of time – less than a day. If you’re busy like me break them down into ridiculously small tasks that can be finished in minutes.
- You now have a list of tasks that you can do, day by day, to come closer to reaching your goal. Now, do at least one EVERY DAY! If you do that, you can be confident you are coming closer to achieving your goal.
For example, one of my goals is “do the graphic design layout of an article in +81 magazine”. See what I mean about picking things that seem impossible? At the moment I’m barely scratching the surface of my studies of graphic design. It’s not my top goal (can’t reveal that, sorry) but it is something I’m having a ton of fun with and I would be extremely proud to accomplish that goal in the next year.
The point is that if I want to achieve it I need to start somewhere. Even if I don’t complete the specific goal in a year I will be WAY closer to being able to achieve it than if I didn’t put the thought into it and keep doing at least something every day.
Again, I just started doing this about a week ago but I already feel more focused and am accomplishing more of what I want to be doing. Give it a shot.
Good post. I have started keeping a giant checklist on me at all times. I was tending to let little things slip past without getting done. So I look at the list at key times during the day. Once in the morning before leaving the apartment, once at lunch, once before leaving work to head home, and once before I go to sleep. I try not to let a day go by without checking something off the list. The items are not goals exactly, but some of them can be items that need to get done in order to work on goals.
Keeping it on you at all times – that’s a good idea. Right now I’m storing my list on Google Documents which is convenient in that I can get to it from any computer but sometimes it would be nice to review it in the train or elsewhere.
I think you are completely right about looking at the list multiple times every day. It helps keep it in your mind and keep you focused on what you need to do. Good stuff.