Meeting Your Goals #1: Getting Focused

This is the first post in a three-part series on succeeding in meeting your goals. The next two posts can be found at Meeting Your Goals #2: Making a Commitment and Meeting Your Goals #3: Tracking and Measuring Your Progress.

We all have our own definition of “success”. For some, it’s making a certain amount of money, or leading a certain type of lifestyle. For more people, I suspect, real “success” is about having close, loving relationships; contributing to the world; becoming the person who, deep inside, we know we can be.

Most of us have goals, written or unwritten, concrete or vague. In these cases, “success” simply means achieving what we set out to do. This article, and the two following it, are going to explore three key aspects of succeeding in this way:

• Focus
• Commitment
• Tracking

These are all contributory factors to success: sure, you can meet your goals even if you lack focus and commitment and you never track your progress … but your chances are a darn sight better if you work on getting those three areas sorted.

(A quick aside here. Before you get any of those in place, you need to be working on YOUR goals. Not your dad’s goals for you, or your wife’s goals for you, but YOUR goals for you. If you’re struggling ot figure out what you want, read of Stop Trying to Please Everyone: Live Your Way.)

I’m far from perfect at these, but working on each area has helped me reach a number of goals in different areas of my life. (Note: after Jeffrey’s comment, I should mention I didn’t do all these at the same time – though several overlapped.)

• I lost 45lbs by changing my eating habits and taking up exercising
• I’ve written four novels
• I built up my savings from £32 to almost £5000 in nine months.
• I run my own business

None of these would have happened without a fairly strong degree of focus. Big goals need time, energy and consistent dedication – which generally means you can’t do everything you want, all at once. (A lesson that I seem to have to learn repeatedly…)

Don’t Try to Do Too Much

How often have you set goals or made resolutions – perhaps at New Year – only to find that your initial burst of enthusiasm petered out into exhaustion after a few days? Trying to split your focus between multiple projects is tough: even goals which don’t necessarily require a lot hours will use up your energy.

So how many goals can you have on the go at the same time?

There’s no magic number. Some people like to focus with laser-intensity on one goal at a time – others are happiest when working towards several goals.

All too often, though, we’re chasing a lot of goals at once – and either making little progress, or burning out. Trying to lose 40lbs, write a novel, start a small business and clear your debts all at the same time is going to leave you feeling stressed – and probably no closer to any of those goals. You’ll know if you’re trying to do too much at once.

Here are some questions to think about, whether you’re trying to clear up your current schedule, or whether you’re considering taking on something new:

• Have you written down your goals and major commitments? (Writing brings clarity.)
• Are you feeling stressed or burned out? Do you have enough “down time”? Or do you feel guilty whenever you’re being “unproductive”?
• Where are you in relation to your current goals? If you’re in the early stages on each, or if you keep stopping and restarting, you want to ditch some things.

Only One Goal Can Be First

Jot down your goals on a bit of paper, and rank them in order from the one which is the most important to you to the one which is least important. If you could accomplish just one of these goals this year, which would it be? Write that at the top, then ask yourself the same question for the rest of your list, and rank your goals in order.

If you’ve realised you need to ditch some goals, this is a very useful exercise. It’s important that you think about which goals really matter to you … not which goals might please your parents, impress your friends, or win you status.

Once you’ve chosen your top goal, it’s a lot easier to take action. Use the first hour of your day to work on that goal. (You might want to make this the first hour of your evening when you’re home from your day job, if applicable – or check out Dave Navarro’s excellent Becoming an Early Riser. In practice, this could mean:

• Going to the gym first thing in the morning – or on your way home from work
• Writing a couple of pages of your novel each morning
• Reading another chapter of a book you’re learning from
• Catching up with a paperwork or email backlog for an hour each morning

Why do you need to do this first in your day (or evening)? Because as the day goes on, interruptions, distractions and energy-drags add up. I’m drafting this blog post at 8.15am on a Sunday morning (due to making very little progress on it yesterday, when I didn’t get started first thing!) Emails, “emergencies”, other people’s interruptions … all of these will seem more urgent than your goal, and if you don’t get it done first thing, it’s likely not to get done at all. We’ve all had days where we’ve planned to accomplish something (perhaps writing a presentation at work, or an essay for school) – and it just hasn’t happened. For Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “putting first things first” is so important that it forms one of these key seven habits:

What are “first things?” First things are those things you, personally, find of most worth.

(Habit 3 – First Things First, Stephen Covey, StephenCovey.com)

For some goals, an hour each day isn’t an effective way to work. I find this with my novel: I prefer to write for a few hours, a couple of times a week. If you find this an easier way to work towards your goal, set aside two blocks of time (3-4 hours each), twice a week. You might use this time to:

• Prepare and freeze healthy meals for each weeknight
• Work on a creative project like painting, composing, or writing
• Take on a second job or start a small business to make additional income
• Clear our and decorate a neglected room in your house

Get Clear About Your Goals

The final aspect of focus that I want to talk about is clarity. You can’t focus effectively on a goal if the goal itself is fuzzy. This is one of the reasons why every life coach and self-help guru will talk about the importance of writing goals down: it forces you to be clear exactly what it is you’re trying to do.

One critical aspect of goals is that they must be defined in binary terms. At any point in time, if I were to ask you if you had achieved your goal yet, you must be able to give me a definitive “yes” or “no” answer; “maybe” is not an option.

(The Power of Clarity, Steve Pavlina, StevePavlina.com)

How will you know when you’ve achieved your goal?

Be specific. If your goal is currently “lose weight”, will you have achieved it if you lose 2lbs? 6lbs? 20lbs? If your goal is “write a novel”, does that mean the first draft? A polished version that you’re proud of? Publication? Will a 50,000 word novella mean you’ve met your goal, or are you aiming to write a 150,000 word blockbuster?

Sometimes, your goal might be hard to define in quantitative terms. Perhaps your current goal is “figure out what I want to do with my life” (a pretty significant goal, in my opinion, and one I wish I’d had when I was twenty one!) How will you know when you’ve achieved that? Write it down.

Maybe you’ll be looking for a certain feeling, perhaps confidence or excitement. Maybe you’ll decide that you’ll try a number of new possibilities, and once you’ve had a go at each, you’ll have discovered much more about your passions. If you feel that it’s impossible to know the end point for your goal – if it’s more of a journey than a destination – then at least be clear about the steps you’re going to take along the way.

This is the first in a three-part series on how to successfully meet your goals. If you’re not already enjoying posts straight to your RSS reader, click here for the feed.

Or pop your email address in the box below, hit “submit”, click on the confirmation link you receive – and you’ll get new posts delivered to your inbox.