Set Goals for life: Part III

• Mini goals:The first step of attaining any goal is breaking it up into smaller goals with more proximate timelines. For example the journey towards your 5 year long-term goal starts with breaking it up into monthly goals, and then weekly goals. The crucial step between planning and doing is breaking up even your weekly goals into daily mini-goals.
• When to set which goal?If you’ve reached till the step of putting monthly milestones on the path to your goals, that’s already a great achievement. But at this stage some people make the mistake of creating weekly/daily goals for all the weeks/days between now and their goal-deadline. This exercise is a waste of time and can turn out to be frustrating. Let me explain better. You have a target to reach for each of the next 12 months to be able to reach your year-end goal. Once you have the month-wise plan ready, you take the first month, calculate where you need to get by the end of each of the four weeks to be able to get to your desired point at the end of the month. Then you take the first week and decide what you have to do to each of the days of this week to be able to get there. The important point here is that, at this stage you don’t need to worry about the 2^nd week, or the 2^nd month, because you don’t know where you’ll actually reach but the end of the 1^st week/1^st month, what contingencies will be there, etc. So if you set goals for those later periods of time now, that’ll be a waste of your time, which you would be using better if you concentrate on achieving your daily tasks now!
• Power of writing it down: Now you have your daily goals for the whole week. One simple, mechanical, yet effective way of keeping yourself on track is writing them down. No, not as a list. Every day before going to bed, absolutely without fail, you have to write down what you want to achieve tomorrow. It can be a task tinier than the tiniest. But you have to pen it down. That makes it a commitment. That makes it something real. As for me, I’m always filled with hope and enthusiasm to write down my targets for the next day before going to bed. And that feeling motivates me to wake up the next morning the moment the alarm rings, and not hit the snooze button! That’s the power of written commitments.
• Tiny daily tasks:Set yourself very achievable, very clearly defined daily tasks. If you’re someone who doesn’t find it so easy to get motivated (like ALL of us!), I’d suggest you make your daily tasks very tiny, like reading two pages of a book, or writing two paragraphs of your next blog post, or doing just ten push-ups. If you have in front of you a task that already looks overwhelming to you, how can you expect your mind to feel motivated about it? The carrot for our mind when it comes to achieving goals is the pleasurable feeling called “sense of achievement” that it feels when the task is completed. If it’s already sure that you’ll not be able to complete your task, or if the displeasure of actually going through the task (think running for two hours) seems greater than the expected “sense of achievement”, what’s there for your mind in it? It’ll withhold the fuel of “motivation” in this case. The funny thing about this method is that, once you’re in the process.
• Report card: Did it make you happy and proud in childhood when you received an A in a test? Did you feel at that moment that you wanted to get an A in the next test too? How about putting a similar reward mechanism in place now, that’ll give you that little rush and push you forward a little? That’s the role of the ‘report card’/ ‘success journal’. It’s a journal where you write down your accomplishments of the day at the end of every day. I’m sure you realize what a powerful tool this one is. Every night when you write down what’s already done, it fills you with satisfaction, and it motivates you to set tasks for the next day, and you’re washed over with enthusiasm. Just one word of caution: Use your report card only for writing what’s already done, never what you’re going to do, even if what you’re going to do is something really tiny and you’re sure you’ll be able to finish it that very day.