The Simple Steps To Reaching Your Goals
By Carol Halsey
I’m sure this is not the first time you have heard about goal setting. The reason you keep hearing about it is because it really is important to your life. A good definition of goals is that they are dreams with deadlines. Yes, you can make your dreams come true. How do you want your life to be 10 years from now? How about 5 years, next year, or even 6 months from now.
The only difference between setting goals for your business or career, and setting personal goals is the subject matter. With commitment and persistence, and setting goals, your life can be any way you want it.
When you actually sit down and start identifying goals, you will probably end up with a long list. Decide what is most important to you in your business and personal lives. All goals do not have equal value. Some will be more meaningful to you. These are the goals to start on. Keep your list of the remaining goals to get back to later. Trying to do too much at the same time can be self-defeating.
Once you have selected the goals to start on, give each goal a deadline. Short term goals, such as completing a project, will be completed in six months or less. Medium term goals, such as increasing a customer base, or revenue, will be a yearly target. Your goal for career advancement could be in this time frame. Long term goals can run for several years, such as where do you want your business to be in 5 years, or building your nest egg to retire in 5, 10 or 20 years.
Write your goals down, as this increases commitment. Make your deadline for each goal realistic and reachable. There is no right or wrong on how long you determine it will take to reach a goal. It will be different for each person and each goal. Whatever is comfortable for you is what counts.
Okay, you have done this. Now, how do you get started? By identifying what you must do to accomplish your goals. Look at each one individually. Under each goal, write down the tasks to be undertaken to reach that goal. You may not think of everything to the smallest detail, but you will come up with the major tasks. Give each one of these tasks a deadline.
On short term goals, your deadlines will most likely be daily, weekly and monthly. On long term goals, deadlines are more like six months, first year, eighteen months, second year. You can break these down even further. If you know what you want to accomplish the first six months of a long term goal, what can you do this month, next month, etc. to get there. Include these tasks and their deadlines in your calendar, and schedule the time needed to work on them.
Once this is done with all your goals, you have made a contract with yourself and the commitment to take action. This is your road map to get you where you want to go. Each day, ask yourself if what you are doing is helping you get there. If the answer is no, be sure you know why you are doing it at all.
If all this seems difficult or overwhelming, start with just one goal. Make it easy and short term. Once you have accomplished this, go on to another goal. Remember that life is a journey to be enjoyed. Be kind to yourself. You will find by setting goals and identifying what you need to do to get there, will cut down on a lot of stress in your life. At the same time, you will be making those dreams a reality.
Here are a few good quotes to inspire you.
“Happiness, wealth, and success are by-products of goal setting, they cannot be the goal themselves. ” - Denis Waitley
“If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” - Laurence J. Peter
“People have more options than they think they do. But most people spend more time planning their vacations than thinking about what they want to do with their lives.” - Bob McDonald
“What you do every day should contribute to giving your life meaning. If it doesn’t, why are you doing it?” - Don Hutcheson
Carol Halsey is Founder and President of Business Organizing Solutions. She is a professional organizer, consultant, speaker, and author of “93 Organizing Tips to Simplify Your Business Life.” You can get this booklet and articles, ideas and a free Idea Kit, filled with simple tips for saving time, by visiting her web site: http://www.PilesToFiles.com
“Free” accounts will be closed soon
We will be closing the “free” and “trial” account in the coming week or so, as it no longer supports our business model, nor does it seem to bring much value to our existing customers.
If you’d like to keep your account, please upgrade to the “Standard” plan as soon as possible. Otherwise, do nothing and your account will be automatically closed and your data will be removed.
GoalsOnTrack: Set Goals For Yourself Online
Friends at MakeUseOf.com has just posted a review on GoalsOnTrack.
Check it out at http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/goalsontrack-goal-setting-tracker/. (Thanks Kaly!)
How to Set Goals and Manage Tasks with GoalsOnTrack
Many of you have contacted me with questions about setting goals and adding tasks in GoalsOnTrack. There isn’t “official” documentation for the site, as I understand that most users should have no problem in figuring out how to use the site very easily.
However, there are certain things that I’d like to share with you, so that you will have a better idea how the software is designed and perhaps find ways to make better use of it for yourself.
1. Relationship between goals and tasks
In GoalsOnTrack, there isn’t a very strict sense of what should be considered a “goal”, and what should be a “task”. It’s pretty much all up to you. If a goal is too small, it can just be a task; and if a task seems too big, you can make it into a goal.
2. Sub-goals or sub-tasks
There is no hierarchy relationships among goals or tasks. Or in other words, there is no sub-goals, or sub-tasks. Originally I thought this might make things unnecessarily complicated, but now it seems that it might make sense to support this feature. This will probably be implemented in the next version.
3. Goal ‘measure’ field vs Task ‘outcome’ field
If you have noticed, there is a “Measure” field for the goal. The purpose of it is to track how much progress has been made on the goal. In order to make it work, you should enter data as numbers, or at least starting with numbers, such as “25″, “10 chapters”, “2500 visitors”, “$5000″ etc. This number will be used when computing your actual progress on the goal.
If a goal has a “Measure” field filled, whenever you complete a task for it, you will have a chance to enter a number for “What progress have you made towards the goal?” All these values of completed tasks are added up to calculate your real progress on the goal.
4. Time tracking for tasks
In the software, the time tracking feature is really designed for tracking tasks that won’t take longer than 3 or 4 hours. If your task will take much longer than that, and you still want to track the time on it. It’s suggested you further break down this task into smaller tasks and make the original task as their goal. This way not only you can track the exact time spent on the task, you will also complete it more easily by focusing on one baby step at a time.
That’s all for now. If you have any questions or comments related to setting goals and managing tasks, please feel free to leave a reply here or contact me directly.
Harry
Problems with the site shown in IE6.x browsers
I recently realized that some users are having problem viewing the site in correct layout/format under IE6.x browsers. This is mainly because the site’s CSS was developed and tested on IE7, Firefox and Safari browsers. Due to some web standard incompatibility issues (or bugs) of IE5-6 and below browsers, some of the CSS rules are not applied and rendered as expected as in other browsers.
I will be refactoring the CSS code to make it work with IE6 browsers. In the meanwhile, if you have browsers other than IE6(on Windows) installed, such as Firefox, please avoid using IE6 to get the best result in using the site.
Let it snow, let it snow
We had a big snow storm around Vancouver yesterday. This is probably the biggest snowfall I’ve ever seen since I came to live here. Everything is totally white, and everything looks very different from what I used to see everyday. Here are few pictures of the snow, hope you like them.
New look for the home page
I’ve been working on a new design for the home page. The problem with the old(current) design is that it lacks certain critial components, such as navigation) and also the colors do not look very good as well.
I’ve attached a screenshot of the new design, here is how it looks at this moment. My original idea was to make it simple and clean so that visitors will not get distracted by unimportant things except taking the tour and signing up. Hope this new look somehow is an improvement to the current home page. Let me know if you have any suggestions or comments.
How to make best use of GoalsOnTrack
GoalsOnTrack was designed mainly for keeping track of the progress on your goals, by managing the tasks or action steps you take consistently towards achieving your goals. Therefore, the first thing you may want to think about is what kind of goals you want to track using the site.
GoalsOnTrack works best for the types of goals that you need to consistently complete tasks or take steps for. That is, there must be something you need to DO, as opposed to something you must be, or NOT do. For example, a goal like “quit smoking” may not work well in GOT, because the goal itself requires you to actually NOT do something. Same is true with goals like, “become more happy”, “eat less”, or “stay in shape”, unless you can find certain steps or things that you DO to help you move closer to your goal.
Another important feature of GOT is the time tracking. Personally I found most of people don’t get to accomplish their goals is simply because they don’t spend enough on them. We can be busy all day doing all kinds of things, but that may not help you really achieve your goal. The key is not how long you work or spend time on things, but rather how much time is really spent on working on your goals.
With GOT, it’s easy to track amount of time you spend on each of your goals. You only need to remember to use the timer clocks whenever you start or stop working on a task. The software will automatically record how much time you actually spend. You can even log out of the site when the timer is running, it will still remember the correct time amount.
There are some other interesting features which you may want to further explore. If you have any questions, or any idea on how the software can be improved, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Hello world!
Welcome to GoalsOnTrack Blog!
My name is Harry Che, I am the main developer of the GoalsOnTrack.com website.
This is our first post since the beta launch of GoalsOnTrack.com website last month. We’re planning to post more about recent updates to the GOT site and any interesting development here at GOT team.
I am also planning to post articles or personal experiences related to goal setting and general self-improvement related topics.
I’d love to see your feedback and comments about anything related to the GOT website, and any self-help related topics. If you haven’t tried out our website yet, please give it a try at http://www.goalsontrack.com. It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds to sign up.
Thanks,
Harry Che
