Achieving Personal Goals

Businesses do the same thing when faced with a large undertaking, but they call it a “project plan”. Doesn’t matter what you call it as long as it’s accurate, complete, and it describes the major accomplishments along the way to your goal.

2. Break major steps down into specific activities

Once you’ve identified the major milestones to your target, the next action is to break those milestones down into the individual steps you will need to take to reach your goal. Be as specific and use as much detail as you can, so that there’s never any confusion about exactly what you need to do next.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs. -Henry Ford

Click here for an example goal plan with milestones and daily tasks.

3. Set activities to a timeline.

This may be the most important step! By setting your activities to a timeline, you begin to impact your behavior by creating a tension between where you want to be, and where you are at a point in time. Defining the milestones and activities is part “A”, but setting a date when each task must to be accomplished is essential, and if you don’t do it you only have half a plan.

A couple of caveats:

1) Be realistic about what you can accomplish. 9 times out of 10 we overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term.

2) Be absolutely clear that you’re going to fail occasionally, and that’s just part of the process! Especially if you’re a member of the perfectionist community, you may think that once you’ve tripped up a couple of times all is lost. That’s just wrong thinking, and it’s derailed more people than the difficulty of a goal ever did.