With the holidays right around the corner, it’s easy to get distracted away from work and productivity. With all the insane news, upcoming election, and great television, the last thing you want to focus on is goal setting for the new year. Here are a few pointers:
Write down your goals
This is a big one. Zig Ziglar cited a study done years ago where (I’m paraphrasing here) they tracked a bunch of Harvard students decades — the 3% of students who wrote down their goals outperformed the other 97% who had no written goals. As Zig says, how can you hit a target you can’t see?
Print out your goals and put them somewhere where they will be seen every day
The problem a lot of people have with goal setting is they write their goals only to never be seen again. I remember once running across a goal list from 2010 on my computer. I hadn’t seen it for years because I wrote the list and never looked at it again. Needless to say, I achieved very few of the items on the list. Tape it up on your bathroom mirror or on your fridge.
Break down your goals
After you state a goal, break it down into smaller steps. This may seem obvious but most people never dive into the details of a goal. Say your goal is to read 24 books this year. This seems like an overwhelming task. But if you break it down into simple daily steps, it’s no so difficult. For arguments sake, let’s say the average book you read is 350 pages. Times that by 24 books and it comes out to 8,400 pages. If you divide that by 365 days, it comes out to about 24 pages a day, maybe 30 pages if you plan on missing a few days here and there.
Photograph by Jon Ottosson
