Six rules to help you achieve your goals.

Do you think we often achieve our own goals  - on average? Statistics will not please you.

Only eight percent of people achieve their goals.

Perhaps the reason is that many of us do not set effective, realistic goals. Instead of thinking carefully about what needs to be achieved, we focus on how to achieve this.

Once you manage to develop the habit of setting meaningful, achievable goals , working with them becomes much easier.

In this article I will talk about six approaches that help me set goals and achieve them.

Translated to Alconost

Understand why specific goals matter to you

Speaking about goals, you need to understand that intrinsic motivation  is very important here - it will force you to overcome difficulties and rise after failures.

It can be tempting to set goals based on external motivators such as money, prestige or fame.

For example, imagine that you want to get a master's or doctoral degree. First, it may come to mind: "I want to achieve this goal in order to increase potential earnings." Money is a classic external motivator.

However, to facilitate the achievement of this goal, you need to dig a little deeper and find out why this goal is important for you on a personal level: for example, it can be an interesting intellectual task or its achievement will help to better provide for the family.

Break long-term goals into smaller ones - weekly

If you keep in mind long-term goals , this, of course, will help formulate tasks for the week. However, it is useful to break long-term goals into more convenient points.

A good solution is to start with goals for the year. After choosing one of them, break it into smaller ones - for each month and each week.

Let's say you want to write a book for this year - a great long-term goal. If we consider that there are 52 weeks in a year and about 75,000 words in an average book, then a good task for a week would be to write 1,450 words - this is much more convenient in practice.

Week goals for Monday

From the first school days, we got used to the fact that Monday is a new beginning, which means it is an ideal day for setting goals : on this day we have the most optimism and a clear understanding of what we need.

Remember to write down the goals - this will increase the likelihood that you will be engaged in them and achieve them.

Goals must be measurable.

We constantly hear that goals should be measurable, but we don’t always imagine what it means. If a goal seems vague or ambitious, this is a bad sign.

For example, at first glance it might seem that “constantly working on a blog” is a good goal. But if you think about it, it becomes clear that the expression "constantly work" can mean very different things. If you worked on a blog for five minutes daily, but did not finish a single publication, would this mean that you have achieved what you want?

It’s better to set a goal like this: “Write two quality blog posts with 1,500 words each.”

Plan goals with time blocks

The essence of the method of time blocks is the assignment of tasks of certain types to certain periods of time of the day. If you plan your day this way, you are more likely to achieve your goals, as time will already be allocated for them.

Before you start dividing days into time blocks, you should think about your own biological clock  - to take into account the periods of greatest productivity.

To get started, ask yourself:

• Am I an owl or an early bird?
  
• What time do I have the most care?
  
• What time do I have a maximum of creativity?
  

It is best to fill the days with one- and two-hour intervals of continuous work, however, the principles of time blocks can be used in breaks .

At the end of each week, think about your goals.

A great way to increase your mindfulness about your goals is to think about them every week. In addition, this way you will be able to notice important patterns of behavior, and this will help you better think out goals for the next week.

A key part of this reflection can be a discussion with friends or family. However, talking about your own goals should be after they are achieved  - not before. When we share our successes, our mood improves, which motivates us to new achievements. But if you talk in advance about what you want to achieve, it can give a premature feeling of satisfaction and reduce motivation.

It is also important at the end of the week to ask yourself questions that will help evaluate success:

• Did you achieve a specific goal?
  
• If it was possible, what was done turned out to be the most useful in this?
  
• If you failed, what was the most obstacle?
  

Many clever people believe that the most important thing in the end is hard work to achieve goals . But if you are constantly busy, it may seem that the time spent not on moving toward goals has been wasted.

However, if you slow down and reevaluate your goals, it can help a lot in achieving them later.

As Arianna Huffington wrote , “we mistakenly believe that success is the result of the amount of time invested in the work, although its“ quality ”is more important.”

And the correct formulation of goals is, without a doubt, a rational waste of time.

About the translator

Translation of the article was done in Alconost.

Alconost localizes games , applications and sitesin 70 languages. Native translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, project managers 24/7, any format of string resources.

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