One of the most important tools for organizing your time is to know your goals.
When you know your goals, this allows you to prioritize things a lot more easily. Know what’s important to you, know where you’re trying to get and know what you need to do to get there. This way, you can much more easily decide what is most pressing and what will help you get there.
No one else can tell you what’s important and what isn’t. Not your employer, not your parents, not your partner. There is no ‘right or wrong’ way to live life, so you need to decide what’s most important to you. Maybe that’s your family, maybe it’s your fitness, maybe it’s becoming the next rock start sensation. It’s all legitimate and it helps you to focus your life much more easily.
You may even decide that your goal in life is to have lots of friends and have lots of great adventures, memories and experiences. In that case, you might decide to turn some of the advice in this book so far on its head. Maybe you spend less time at work and less time in the gym so that you have more time to fill your social calendar.
Either way, you need to know where you’re going and what’s important to you.
This is a good place to start then. Instead of starting with a goal, start with a ‘vision’ and try to picture what you want your life to ideally look like. This should have much more of an emotional impact than simply writing down ‘get rich’.
What you might also find, is that once you start visualizing the lifestyle you want, it might impact what your goals actually are.
For example, you might think you want to get rich – but if your vision is mostly about living in a beautiful home, or travelling a lot, then maybe the money is just a means to an end? Maybe your real goal is to have a better home, or to travel more? And maybe there are better ways to accomplish those things!
Another popular tip is to imagine writing your own eulogy. The point is to imagine that you have died and you’re writing the speech you would like to be given at your funeral. In other words, how do you want to be remembered? Do you talk about what a family man you were? Or about how you had a life filled with adventures?
How to Write Goals Properly
Now you know what you want from life, the next step is to formalize that into useful and workable goals. The key here is not to make vague or unuseful goals. If your goal is: ‘lose 10lbs by next year’ then you are unlikely to be successful.
Why? Because a year is a long time from now for starters. This means you can easily put things off and hope that you’ll be able to get back on track later on.
Another problem with writing goals like this is that a lot of it is outside of your control. In other words, even if you do everything right, you might not lose 10lbs. This can be very disheartening and can lead to you losing motivation.
So instead, your goals need to be concrete, short-term and well within your control.
A much better example?
“Go to the gym 3 times a week, every week”
Or
“Eat under 2,000 calories a day”
These are goals that you can grade on a pass/fail every single day and that are completely within your control. And as long as you focus on doing these things, you’ll find that the ‘overarching’ vision takes care of itself!
Follow the tag THE STREAMLINED MIND to read the complete series.
