Time flies. Another year-end approaches. Are you on track to reach your goals this year? If not, it may be because your goals are too big or too long term.
There’s nothing wrong with big goals. It’s just that we tend to fixate on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and forget about the short-term activities it takes to get there.
When a goal takes months or years to reach, it’s easy to lose sight of what we’re supposed to be doing today. We need to couple our big goals with short-term goals that we can track on a daily basis.
One author says the problem with long(er) term goals is that there’s no sense of urgency. It’s too easy to tell ourselves that we have lots of time before the deadline, and our mantra becomes, “I’ll do it tomorrow”.
Before we know it, days turn into weeks and months and the deadline has come and gone.
His solution is to break up big goals into goals that can be accomplished in seven days.
“If you can’t accomplish it in seven days, the goal is too big. It’s all right to have a big goal on the horizon, but you’ll never get there if you can’t break it down into actionable steps. So ask yourself, “If my massive goal is all the way over there, what do I need to get done this week to move myself in that direction?”
I think most of us manage our lives with a weekly calendar, so breaking things up into weekly goals makes sense. We might not be able to see what a month looks like but next Monday is just around the corner.
