goals

Achieve Your Goals with These Time Management Tips

By

One of the most useful skills that you can develop in your life is effective and powerful time management skills. If you’re not able to manage your time well, there is no way you are going to reach your goals in life. The truth of the matter is that time is the great equalizer of life. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do; you have the same amount of time as the next person. If you’re serious about accomplishing your goals, you need to get serious about learning to manage your time. Here are several tips to help you manage your time so you can achieve your goals.

Set Your Goals the Right Way

You probably didn’t know that there is a right way and a wrong way to set goals. If you don’t set your goals the right way, you’ll end up lacking the proper targets, which will cause you to fall off track. However, when you set them the right way, you are better able to see things through and make sure that you have a compelling reason for wanting to achieve them.

Find a Good System for Managing Your Time

If you want to be successful in managing your time, you have to find the right system to do it. The quadrant time-management system is one of the most effective, as it splits your activities into four quadrants based on their urgency and importance. Your tasks are either urgent, important, both, or neither. You want to focus on the not-urgent-but-important quadrant while staying away from the, neither quadrant.

Instill Keystone Habits into Your Life

Keystone habits are those that not only solicit other good habits but help you to eliminate bad habits too. Focus your time and energy on keystone habits, and you’ll start to get much better at managing your time overall by making your habit development process much more manageable.

Eliminate Bad Habits

Our bad habits are one of the biggest time-wasters in our lives. Whether it’s binge-watching your favorite T.V. show, playing games, or going out to drink with your friends, those habits will eat up your precious time. Use your time wisely by dropping your bad habits, if you’re serious about achieving your goals.

By implementing these time management techniques into your day, you can improve your time management skills and boost your productivity so that you can achieve your goals.

Why People Fail To Achieve Their Goals

By

It’s pretty common to hear people, especially on social media, broadcast their goals in life. They want to be “this” and “that.” They’ll be big superstars by the time they turn 25, or they’ll be millionaires by 30, and so on.

For the most part, these goals are mere posturing. They’re not actually going to achieve their goals. Sure, they’re probably going to start drafting a plan on how exactly they’re going to conquer their goals, but they’re still going to fail big time.

The #1 reason why people fail to achieve goals is that they’re not making the right kind of goals. They’re only making vague goals.

Ask them the specifics of their goal, and they won’t have a solid answer. They just want to become rich, they just want to be happy, they want to become financially free. But they don’t know exactly when that’s going to happen. If you ask them, they’ll probably say “whenever.”

Another reason is that most people are all talk, and no action. They’ll share their goals with everyone, but when it comes to taking action, they’ll bolt.

Even if they have a smart goal in place, they’ll still lack that motivation to actually do something to achieve that goal. They’ll find it too hard or too difficult. Suddenly, they’ll be too busy working on something else and won’t have time to work on their goals.

The third reason is people simply can’t commit. They probably think someone else is going to help them achieve their goals! But that’s their goal, right? Or, maybe they’ve got a few hundred big goals they’re working on (small goals toward a single big goal is different) and they don’t know which goal they’re going to pursue today.

They can’t make up their minds. They can’t even be bothered to figure out which goal appeals most to them, they’re just putting everything out there, hoping someday something will come to life!

Lastly, many people don’t know how to deal with failure. They encounter failure for the first time, and they tuck their tails in and hide away somewhere, never to be seen again.

The right approach when dealing with failure is to learn from it. It’s okay to feel hurt, to feel disappointed in yourself. But don’t let that be the reason you no longer want to move forward with your goals.

Time to get SMART

By

A good way to bring calmness out of chaos is to set goals. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times before, but it’s true. After all, if you don’t know what you want, how will you know when you’ve got it?

When you set goals, you should make sure they are SMART goals. This term was first proposed by George T. Doran in the November 1981 issue of Management Review.

The acronym stands for…

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-Bound

Let’s go through these one at a time.

Specific: You should have a good idea of what the goal is. Know what you want to achieve.

Measurable: Have a way of tracking your progress. This can give you an incentive to stay on track as well as a way to stay motivated.

Achievable: Can you accomplish this goal? Is it realistic? If the answer is “no”, don’t waste your time. Move on to something else instead.

Relevant: Does your goal fit in to the bigger picture? Is it in line with other objectives or will it be a distraction? Your goal should be in alignment with other objectives.

Time-bound: Providing a deadline for completing a goal sets it in focus and helps to avoid procrastination. Make sure the deadline is realistic, however.

You can set SMART goals for a specific project, for a business in general, or for your life and what you want to make of it – either in the long or short term.

When deciding on how to achieve your goals, it’s a good idea to start with the result you want, and then work backwards to now. That way, you can define each step you need to take, and will know what is necessary to get the desired outcome before you even start to work towards it.

 

PS. Your copy of my Course to going from chaos to calm is waiting for you here: 

 

X