The major hurdle you’ll face in setting your goals comes from your daily action that will lead to their accomplishment.
I am not sure if you have been in my position …but my own weakness in achieving my goals comes from follow through.
I have struggled with the habit of losing focus on achieving goals for a long time and It concerned me.
So a couple of years back I wanted to do something about overcoming my bad habit…I started looking for ways to overcome this dream killing habit.
As I read and studied around the subject of goal setting, I realized the cause of my failing to follow through on my daily goals- came from how I spent my time working on my goals.
Let me explain.
You see we all have the same 24 hours each day. The same numbers of hours to work, sleep, eat and relax.
What separates the successful and unsuccessful individual boils down to … time management
Brian Tracy, best selling author of the classic time management book Eat that frog says time management is the raw material for success in life.
He concludes that success in life depends on how you spend your time on your most important goals.
How do you spend your day?
Do you spend your time working on your most important goals …or you are just spending time doing what is important for others ?
Now in trying to solve the dilemma of following through on my goals, I had to look closely at how I spent my time.
When I did an analysis of how I spend my day … the results shocked me.
I saw that I spent time on mundane tasks that had no impact towards the achievement of my goals.
I was like a robot working on a list of tasks with no clear objective.
The truth was that I was nowhere near achieving my major objectives after ticking off the boxes at the end of my day.
You see I was like a hamster on a wheel. I was busy but not productive.
Lack of productivity is a major obstacle to goal setting
Well I thought the problem was an isolated one . I thought that I was alone. I was wrong.
The problem of lack of productivity is widespread in the work place.
Business insider published an article in November 2011 on the subject.
The article published the highlights of Microsoft Office personal productivity challenge, which drew responses from 38000 people from 100 countries.
The survey showed:
- People work an average of 45 hours a week; they consider 17 hour unproductive
- People spend an average of 5.6 hours in meetings; 69 per cent feel they meetings are unproductive
- The commonest obstacles to productivity; unclear objectives, lack of clear team communication, ineffective meetings, procrastination
As you can see it’s very easy to be, side tracked from working on your goals.
I wanted to overcome these obstacles to my becoming more productive…So I started thinking “what am I doing wrong that is not allowing me to achieve my goals”.
You Need To Prioritize Your Tasks
The answer eluded me for a long time… until I read Steven Covey’s bestselling book the 7 habits of highly effective people that I found the solution.
Steven Covey ‘s summarized briefly, what separated highly successful people from the unsuccessful.
He concluded that the secret to being effective and super productive comes from prioritizing your goals.
In addition, he also believed that you must align your daily tasks in such a way that …you spent more time working on tasks that will help you your goals on the long term.
He came up with a model to prioritize your daily task that is … divide your daily tasks or to do list into four quadrants:
- Important and urgent tasks you must do to avoid a crisis; it may be a deadline on a project, or paying your mortgage bills
- Important but not urgent tasks are the ones that will advance you in the direction of your goals. They include working on your side business, reading about investing, taking a home study course related
- Urgent but not important tasks are tasks like replying to a non urgent work, taking phone calls unrelated to your work
- Not urgent and not important tasks are doing things like gossiping with your colleagues, watching sitcoms, checking emails
The important lesson from prioritizing your daily tasks is to do less of the unimportant tasks… and concentrate on doing more of your important but not urgent tasks. These tasks are the ones that will move you towards achieving your goals.
The next major obstacle most people face in achieving their goals is lack of motivation. I hear many of my friends tell me ” I need to find the motivation to start on my project”. They give excuses about having to work full time, taking care of the children.
The truth is there will never be a “perfect time’ to start any project
Action brings motivation
The solution to lack of motivation is to take action on your most important tasks even if when you are not in the mood.
Why? Because you’ll gain motivation once, you start taking action
Robert Ringer New York time bestselling author of million dollar habits says, “Motivation comes from taking action”.
Ringer says I would not have become a bestselling author if I waited to get the motivation to start writing daily.
He goes on to say, “when I wake up every morning I start typing no matter how bad my spelling or sentences look.
I know I can always go back and edit my writing. But if I wait to get motivation before writing I’ll never become a bestselling author”
The whole point of what I have learned from Robert Ringer is this… action brings motivation.
When you take action on your goals, you also get motivated.
Thinking positively on your goals is not enough. You also need to take action
when I started to prioritize my daily tasks and take action on my most important task… I started achieving more of my goals daily
I now feel confident every time I set goals because I know how to accomplish them.
Now this does not mean I now have a 100 per cent success rate. No, I don’t. Nevertheless, I have had a higher rate of success in accomplishing my goals
The bottom line to being more productive daily is to work on your important but not urgent tasks. Take action daily on your most important tasks.
The best way to make use of what I have shared is to do the following:
- List your goals for the week, month and year
- Create a road map of the steps you need to achieve your goals
- Create a list of tasks you have to do to move you towards objective
- When you write your daily tasks list include your goals as part of the list
- Start your day by prioritizing your to do list into the categories I have shown to you
- Spend most of your time working on your important and not urgent task
- Use the 3-D formula. Do your important tasks. Delegate some of your tasks. Dump or leave the unimportant task undone.
- Track your progress daily
- Keep taking action daily
When you organize your day such that you work most of the time on your most important tasks…you’ll never have to worry about setting goals and failing to achieve them.
When you realize that…It is in taking action on your goals that you will get motivated to accomplish your goals… you’ll never have to wait to gain motivation before acting on your goals
To your success
Akin Osho