The Secret To Achieving Your Daily Goals
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