Goals ~ Do You Have Them?

Do you set yourself goals to achieve each day, week or month? I am learning that if I do set myself goals to achieve, my time management seems to be much more structured and I actually get more work done. The days I wake up with no particular purpose in mind I seem to spend the day flopping around like a fish out of water.

Setting yourself a goal each day means having a purpose for your life. Without this purpose, I find myself dribbling time away doing inane and untargeted stuff that can't be called 'jobs' because they don't achieve anything for me or for anyone else.

Doing a daily job leads one towards achieving their weekly goal. This is why your weekly goal needs to lead towards your monthly goal. Can you remember when you were a kid and you used to play "stepping stones" in the creek?

This is a game where you have to pick a rock that is either in place or you have to add it a stepping distance from the next one and it had to be large enough to keep your feet dry and stable enough to hold your weight so you didn't get wet. Our Mum used to get very upset when we came home wet from playing in the creek! Not because we were wet but more because we had been playing in the creek. As a Mother, I now understand why.

Anyway, if we set our stepping stones right, we were able to cross the creek, stay dry and avoid parental anger. The same applies to setting myself goals because I now get very upset with myself when I end a day and ask myself "what did I actually achieve today?" By asking myself this question frequently, it seems to keep me much more focused and if I have to answer "not much" to myself, I know I have to stop and start planning. The worst thing is that there is no no-one else to blame but myself.

Something that helps me is to know what the first job is that I want to do each morning. Write it down on a new dated page. I use a desk diary for an entry each day to help me keep track of the days events. Whether that is just a phone number or a piece of miscellaneous information that I want to remember. Instead of having 9,000 post-it notes hanging around, I find my desk diary keeps everything in daily order and if I want to go back to something in three months time, I still have the information.

By writing the monthly goal in the bottom section of the last day of the month, I can check it off as being achieved or know what else I need to do. If something hasn't worked for me, then go and find out why.

My monthly article writing goal for the end of October 2010 is 130,000 readers. Do you know yours?

My blog commenting for this month is ten full comments each day on ten new blogs. Do you have a set goal for this activity or is this something that you never do? After all, just because something works for one doesn't mean it will work for everyone. We all work differently but there seems to be a larger percentage of us who need a certain amount of structure in our lives and goal setting is a good 'stepping stone' method to achieve them.