Without a doubt there are effective ways to achieve your goals. There are also plenty of organization tools to help you. Software, special calendars, PDAs and notebooks all proliferate the “get things done” market today.
By all means, use them. But you’ll find they’ll be pretty useless if you don’t know one very essential rule first:
The number one way to never achieve your goals is to not have any
Sorry if the brevity of that stroke of genius disappoints, but it’s nevertheless true. In all the consulting I’ve done, whether as a life-coach or designer or productivity expert, the problem people run into more than any other is lack of defined goals.
One stable rule I use is this:
If you can’t physically write it down, it’s not clear enough.
Set a target, write it down and go for it. And don’t worry about whether or not it is the perfect plan. If it changes, it changes. It’s better to just make the decision and get started than to wallow around wasting time with uncertainty. You can always change your mind. And if your initial idea doesn’t work, you can rule it out as an option and now you’re one step closer.
One Comment
Another way to never achieve your Goals is to have so many going simultaneously with no order of priority whereby you are always superbusy but none of them are ever completed.
Live Your Dreams,
Jill Koenig