The Unification Epicenter of True Lightworkers
6.2 The KEY to Goal Setting Success
The key to achieving your goals is taking action. The key to getting action on your goals is to integrate the goal’s action plan into your day-to-day routine and tasks, and that’s where it’s important to have ‘Planners’. It’s all about getting yourself organised.
‘Planners’ are specifically for listing the action items or steps to achieve your goals, and ‘schedules’ are used to see how the action plan should pan out over the program and to identify any conflicts in resourcing. The schedules will give you a visual representation of effort. For example, if you prepare a yearly schedule, and it shows lots of activity in the first 3 months but not much after that, you either have a short term goal only with lots of mini-tasks or you’ve crammed too much into the early stages of your Action Plan – be realistic about how much you can take on at any one time.
The planners can be used to incorporate your goal setting actions and day-to-day activities into the one memory-jogging list. You can use your own system if you like – you can get pads of To Do lists and daily diary’s from your local stationary supplier, or use the calender/ to-do lists that come with most email servers (of course, these are only useful if you have your computer on all the time and use it regularly, otherwise you might forget to check items off the list).
Find a system that works for you. The key here is to be organised – ‘Owls’ are going to love this, but if you’re an ‘Eagle’ or a ‘Peacock’, you may find it hard to be disciplined enough to stay organised, but it pays off as you start to achieve your goal. You’ll also be more productive and efficient in your day-to-day activities if you’re better organised. ‘Doves’, you’ll be great with the organisation part of this step, but make sure you put your personal goals high on your priority list and don’t fall into the trap of looking after everyone else first.
Using the Schedules and Planners
Take a scheduler that covers the duration of your goal (ie yearly, quarterly, etc). List the actions needed to achieve this goal from your SMARTER goal sheet, and draw a line on the schedule starting at the start date and finishing at the end date.
This is intended to be a summary of Action items, so you can wrap some of the steps up together if this is appropriate. Also add any other activities or events coming up that may affect the schedule – this is not a calender of all events, just things that may affect your ability to take action on your goals, for example planned holiday, seasonal work shifts, etc.
How does it look? Too cluttered at the start and not much at the end. Any clusters of activity? This may be OK if the time, effort and level of resourcing to complete those tasks is manageable, but if they all require a lot of effort on your behalf you may be asking for trouble.
Now is the time to smooth out any spikes in activities and fill up any troughs of inactivity to give you a nice steady pace towards achieving your goal. Also make sure you work around any of those non-goal specific events that may otherwise divert your attention from your goal. If you make any changes to the timing or deadlines of any Action Items, make sure you change this on your Action Plan or in the relevant section of the SMARTER goal template, otherwise there will be a conflict between these documents.
Once you’re happy with the spread of activity, you can use one or several of the planners to set daily, weekly or monthly tasks depending on your goal and its specific Action Plan. You may use the daily planner to really keep yourself disciplined in achieving your goals and maintaining organisation in your day-to-day activities, and also use a weekly or monthly planner to allow you look a bit further ahead at what’s coming up for you.
The important thing though, is that if you use say a daily planner, sit down every week with your weekly and monthly planners to prepare your daily action plans for the following week. That way you’ll maintain control and still keep heading in the right direction by using the mid to longer-term planners as your guide to your end result.
Typically, you’ll prepare a schedule once at the start of your goal as a tool for identifying and managing activity spikes and troughs, although you may want to revisit the goal schedule from time to time as goal progress and your life situation changes. Planners should be prepared at the start of the goal, and progressively throughout the goal to ensure full integration with your day-to-day activities and to reflect the dynamic nature of life itself – ie planners need to be flexible, and current.
Some other tips for using the planners include:
Make sure you add the date to the top of the planner so you always know you are using the current plan. It also helps for future reference.
Use different colours to indicate your focus for particular blocks of time. Set your own colour scheme for each focus area (for example exercise, family time, time-out, etc) and use these colours throughout all of the planners you’re using so you can pick out focus areas at a glance.
Include relevant details for the tasks – What? Where? When? Who? How? This will be most detailed for the daily planners, with decreasing level of detail as the planner outlook increases.
Similarly with the ToDo lists:
Make task descriptions as detailed as necessary for you to achieve them – include contact details, step-by-step instructions, resources needed, etc.
Prioritise the items as High | Medium | Low priority (or number them in order of priority, with one being the highest).
Do the High priority items first (or do them in order, starting from number 1)
Only add the items that you can do in the timeframe – it may only be part of a task. Add the
other items onto a Grass-Catcher List or the Weekly | Monthly Planner
Any items you don’t get done get put on the top of the To Do List on your next planner
Tick off items once they are complete.
What is a Grass Catcher List?
In the TOOLBOX on the website you may have noticed a ‘Grass-Catcher List’. This is intended to catch any stray actions and thoughts that you come across from time to time, but don’t necessarily have a scheduled time in place.
They maybe other ‘goals’ that you think you’d like to achieve at some stage or just practical things you need to do. The point of this list is simply to capture these thoughts so they don’t slip through the cracks of your hectic life.
Setting Priorities
We’ve already looked at how to prioritize your goals using:
1. Priority 1: Must Do.
2. Priority 2: Should Do.
3. Priority 3: Nice to Do!
But you also need to prioritise your day-to-day tasks and activities as well as specific action items for your goals, in order to make sure you’re not letting anything slip through the cracks. You will have daily priorities such as taking the kids to school, and you should also have daily goal specific actions – these all need to be prioritized into one seamless set of action items to make sure your day-to-day life doesn’t take precedence over your goals and vice versa.
To prioritize day-to-day activities and goal specific Action Items, try any one of the following systems:
Must Do | Should Do | Nice to do – as we’ve done before.
High | Medium | Low priority – similar to the above with different terminology.
Action ranking system, where you number all action items in the order that you need to do them, from 1 being most important (do this one first) to however many action items there are on your list.
Another popular way of prioritising action items is the Urgent | Important activity matrix originally developed by time and organisational management guru Stephen Covey. This matrix is based on all tasks being assigned a level of ‘urgency’ and ‘importance’ as illustrated below.
Human nature means that we instinctively act on tasks that are ‘urgent’, whether these tasks are important or not. That’s OK for the tasks that are also important, but the other ones are not necessarily the best use of your time and effort.
This matrix can also be used to explain why taking action on goals sometimes gets into trouble. Goals are typically derived from dreams and desires, which by their very nature are not ‘urgent’. Goals are however VERY important and their enabling actions need to be elevated in priority over tasks that are not really important.
So as a tool for helping you prioritise your action items, start by identifying which part of the matrix each task belongs in, and then manage them as follows:
Most importantly, find a prioritisation system that suits you – prioritising tasks is the key to time management and organisation and is essential if you have any hope of achieving your goals.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Activity 6.2…
Prepare a Schedule for your Overall Goal
Select a scheduler that covers the duration of your goal (ie yearly, quarterly, etc). List the actions needed to achieve that goal from your SMARTER goal sheet, and draw a line on the schedule starting at the start date and finishing at the end date. Add any other activities or events coming up that may affect the schedule.
How does it look? Any clusters of activity? What level of resourcing/ effort is required during these clusters of activity? Is this achievable? Are there any non-goal activities or events likely to divert your attention from your goal?
Smooth out any spikes in activities and fill up any troughs of inactivity to give a nice steady pace and resource loading. Make any necessary changes to your Action Plan or in the relevant section of the SMARTER goal template to keep the documents consistent.
Prepare your first set of Planners
Select a Planner/s with a timeframe that suits your goal and prepare your planners, combining your goal specific Action Plan with your day-to-day activities on the same planner. Chose a short term and medium term planner (eg daily and weekly, or weekly and monthly) and prepare up to 1 month worth of planners at a time.
This is your first set of Planners. As you progress through your goal, prepare successive sets of planners combining your goal specific Action Plan with your day-to-day activities.
How to Manage Procrastination
Procrastination is simply putting things off - and we’ve all done it at some stage, whether you’re a Dove, Owl, Peacock or Eagle! It doesn’t mean you’re lazy or not productive, it just means you may be focusing on some tasks at the expense of others, or maybe you’re just having some difficulty overcoming the inertia of getting a particular task started.
The question is, “Why?”, and if you know why you’re procrastinating then you are well on the way to being able to overcome it. Your behaviour profile developed in Section 2 will already indicate some causes of procrastination – ‘Eagles’ may procrastinate over seemingly routine or mundane tasks, ‘Peacocks’ may simply lose interest in a task, ‘Owls’ may wait to achieve perfection before starting a task and ‘Doves’ may avoid tasks that take them out of their comfort zone.
It is important to recognize that your particular behaviour profile will have an influence on HOW you take action on particular tasks and which ones you are likely to procrastinate over, but regardless of this there are also some common causes of procrastination:
There are more enjoyable things to do! Or perhaps you’re just waiting to be in the right frame of mind for launching into action.
There are other tasks to do that are in your ‘comfort zone’ and therefore easier to do.
You may find the task a little daunting and not know where to start, particularly if the task is not
within your normal skill set – yes, even Eagles can feel overwhelmed by challenging tasks!
Fear of failure – refer back to Section 1.3.
Just can’t get started – building up enough momentum to get the ball rolling can take unforeseen effort depending on the task.
You know yourself better than anyone – are you prone to procrastination? Why? Now, be honest with yourself here – understanding whether you are likely to procrastinate on particular types of tasks is vital to overcoming this period of inaction.
So, how do you deal with procrastination?
First of all, you will KNOW WHEN you are procrastinating on a particular task – just monitor your ToDo List or progress against your goal to see the impact of procrastination [goal progress monitoring is discussed in the next chapter]. The important thing is to ask yourself ‘why’ and then ‘how’. For example:
Motivate yourself by setting yourself a reward for getting it done and an even better reward for getting it done on time. Interestingly, most people feel bad when they procrastinate – that’s your subconscious telling you that you’re focusing on the wrong things. Your subconscious also rewards you for completing a task by the little buzz you get when it’s done – so in a way, completing a task is it’s own reward.
Remind yourself of the reason you set this goal in the first place – your big-picture, your motivation and your focus. Keep this in the forefront of your mind to motivate you to continue.
Combining your goal actions with your day-to-day routine action items will help as it will become
‘normal’ for a goal action to be part of your day-to-day routine.
Break down daunting goals into more manageable pieces so you can get some action under your belt. As you start to achieve results, motivation to continue will naturally follow.
Enlist the help of a mentor or support group to follow up on your progress.
Better still, when you are preparing your action plan, ask yourself whether each task is the type of task you’re likely to procrastinate on – if it is, make sure you give yourself every opportunity to be able to achieve it by scheduling it clear of other major tasks that may divert your attention.
At the end of the day, there is no magic solution to procrastination – you just have to bite the bullet and get into it.
“Bite the Bullet” “Just Do It!”
“Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today!”
There are numerous clichés you can use to illustrate the point. There are also some great motivational and inspirational posters available in the Internet (Free ones too) – find one that motivates YOU and hang it on your wall where you can see it every day. It’s all about attitude – embrace the power of positive thinking, and know that YOU are the only person who can make this happen!
‘Planners’ are specifically for listing the action items or steps to achieve your goals, and ‘schedules’ are used to see how the action plan should pan out over the program and to identify any conflicts in resourcing. The schedules will give you a visual representation of effort. For example, if you prepare a yearly schedule, and it shows lots of activity in the first 3 months but not much after that, you either have a short term goal only with lots of mini-tasks or you’ve crammed too much into the early stages of your Action Plan – be realistic about how much you can take on at any one time.
The planners can be used to incorporate your goal setting actions and day-to-day activities into the one memory-jogging list. You can use your own system if you like – you can get pads of To Do lists and daily diary’s from your local stationary supplier, or use the calender/ to-do lists that come with most email servers (of course, these are only useful if you have your computer on all the time and use it regularly, otherwise you might forget to check items off the list).
Find a system that works for you. The key here is to be organised – ‘Owls’ are going to love this, but if you’re an ‘Eagle’ or a ‘Peacock’, you may find it hard to be disciplined enough to stay organised, but it pays off as you start to achieve your goal. You’ll also be more productive and efficient in your day-to-day activities if you’re better organised. ‘Doves’, you’ll be great with the organisation part of this step, but make sure you put your personal goals high on your priority list and don’t fall into the trap of looking after everyone else first.
Using the Schedules and Planners
Take a scheduler that covers the duration of your goal (ie yearly, quarterly, etc). List the actions needed to achieve this goal from your SMARTER goal sheet, and draw a line on the schedule starting at the start date and finishing at the end date.
This is intended to be a summary of Action items, so you can wrap some of the steps up together if this is appropriate. Also add any other activities or events coming up that may affect the schedule – this is not a calender of all events, just things that may affect your ability to take action on your goals, for example planned holiday, seasonal work shifts, etc.
How does it look? Too cluttered at the start and not much at the end. Any clusters of activity? This may be OK if the time, effort and level of resourcing to complete those tasks is manageable, but if they all require a lot of effort on your behalf you may be asking for trouble.
Now is the time to smooth out any spikes in activities and fill up any troughs of inactivity to give you a nice steady pace towards achieving your goal. Also make sure you work around any of those non-goal specific events that may otherwise divert your attention from your goal. If you make any changes to the timing or deadlines of any Action Items, make sure you change this on your Action Plan or in the relevant section of the SMARTER goal template, otherwise there will be a conflict between these documents.
Once you’re happy with the spread of activity, you can use one or several of the planners to set daily, weekly or monthly tasks depending on your goal and its specific Action Plan. You may use the daily planner to really keep yourself disciplined in achieving your goals and maintaining organisation in your day-to-day activities, and also use a weekly or monthly planner to allow you look a bit further ahead at what’s coming up for you.
The important thing though, is that if you use say a daily planner, sit down every week with your weekly and monthly planners to prepare your daily action plans for the following week. That way you’ll maintain control and still keep heading in the right direction by using the mid to longer-term planners as your guide to your end result.
Typically, you’ll prepare a schedule once at the start of your goal as a tool for identifying and managing activity spikes and troughs, although you may want to revisit the goal schedule from time to time as goal progress and your life situation changes. Planners should be prepared at the start of the goal, and progressively throughout the goal to ensure full integration with your day-to-day activities and to reflect the dynamic nature of life itself – ie planners need to be flexible, and current.
Some other tips for using the planners include:
Make sure you add the date to the top of the planner so you always know you are using the current plan. It also helps for future reference.
Use different colours to indicate your focus for particular blocks of time. Set your own colour scheme for each focus area (for example exercise, family time, time-out, etc) and use these colours throughout all of the planners you’re using so you can pick out focus areas at a glance.
Include relevant details for the tasks – What? Where? When? Who? How? This will be most detailed for the daily planners, with decreasing level of detail as the planner outlook increases.
Similarly with the ToDo lists:
Make task descriptions as detailed as necessary for you to achieve them – include contact details, step-by-step instructions, resources needed, etc.
Prioritise the items as High | Medium | Low priority (or number them in order of priority, with one being the highest).
Do the High priority items first (or do them in order, starting from number 1)
Only add the items that you can do in the timeframe – it may only be part of a task. Add the
other items onto a Grass-Catcher List or the Weekly | Monthly Planner
Any items you don’t get done get put on the top of the To Do List on your next planner
Tick off items once they are complete.
What is a Grass Catcher List?
In the TOOLBOX on the website you may have noticed a ‘Grass-Catcher List’. This is intended to catch any stray actions and thoughts that you come across from time to time, but don’t necessarily have a scheduled time in place.
They maybe other ‘goals’ that you think you’d like to achieve at some stage or just practical things you need to do. The point of this list is simply to capture these thoughts so they don’t slip through the cracks of your hectic life.
Setting Priorities
We’ve already looked at how to prioritize your goals using:
1. Priority 1: Must Do.
2. Priority 2: Should Do.
3. Priority 3: Nice to Do!
But you also need to prioritise your day-to-day tasks and activities as well as specific action items for your goals, in order to make sure you’re not letting anything slip through the cracks. You will have daily priorities such as taking the kids to school, and you should also have daily goal specific actions – these all need to be prioritized into one seamless set of action items to make sure your day-to-day life doesn’t take precedence over your goals and vice versa.
To prioritize day-to-day activities and goal specific Action Items, try any one of the following systems:
Must Do | Should Do | Nice to do – as we’ve done before.
High | Medium | Low priority – similar to the above with different terminology.
Action ranking system, where you number all action items in the order that you need to do them, from 1 being most important (do this one first) to however many action items there are on your list.
Another popular way of prioritising action items is the Urgent | Important activity matrix originally developed by time and organisational management guru Stephen Covey. This matrix is based on all tasks being assigned a level of ‘urgency’ and ‘importance’ as illustrated below.
Human nature means that we instinctively act on tasks that are ‘urgent’, whether these tasks are important or not. That’s OK for the tasks that are also important, but the other ones are not necessarily the best use of your time and effort.
This matrix can also be used to explain why taking action on goals sometimes gets into trouble. Goals are typically derived from dreams and desires, which by their very nature are not ‘urgent’. Goals are however VERY important and their enabling actions need to be elevated in priority over tasks that are not really important.
So as a tool for helping you prioritise your action items, start by identifying which part of the matrix each task belongs in, and then manage them as follows:
Most importantly, find a prioritisation system that suits you – prioritising tasks is the key to time management and organisation and is essential if you have any hope of achieving your goals.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Activity 6.2…
Prepare a Schedule for your Overall Goal
Select a scheduler that covers the duration of your goal (ie yearly, quarterly, etc). List the actions needed to achieve that goal from your SMARTER goal sheet, and draw a line on the schedule starting at the start date and finishing at the end date. Add any other activities or events coming up that may affect the schedule.
How does it look? Any clusters of activity? What level of resourcing/ effort is required during these clusters of activity? Is this achievable? Are there any non-goal activities or events likely to divert your attention from your goal?
Smooth out any spikes in activities and fill up any troughs of inactivity to give a nice steady pace and resource loading. Make any necessary changes to your Action Plan or in the relevant section of the SMARTER goal template to keep the documents consistent.
Prepare your first set of Planners
Select a Planner/s with a timeframe that suits your goal and prepare your planners, combining your goal specific Action Plan with your day-to-day activities on the same planner. Chose a short term and medium term planner (eg daily and weekly, or weekly and monthly) and prepare up to 1 month worth of planners at a time.
This is your first set of Planners. As you progress through your goal, prepare successive sets of planners combining your goal specific Action Plan with your day-to-day activities.
How to Manage Procrastination
Procrastination is simply putting things off - and we’ve all done it at some stage, whether you’re a Dove, Owl, Peacock or Eagle! It doesn’t mean you’re lazy or not productive, it just means you may be focusing on some tasks at the expense of others, or maybe you’re just having some difficulty overcoming the inertia of getting a particular task started.
The question is, “Why?”, and if you know why you’re procrastinating then you are well on the way to being able to overcome it. Your behaviour profile developed in Section 2 will already indicate some causes of procrastination – ‘Eagles’ may procrastinate over seemingly routine or mundane tasks, ‘Peacocks’ may simply lose interest in a task, ‘Owls’ may wait to achieve perfection before starting a task and ‘Doves’ may avoid tasks that take them out of their comfort zone.
It is important to recognize that your particular behaviour profile will have an influence on HOW you take action on particular tasks and which ones you are likely to procrastinate over, but regardless of this there are also some common causes of procrastination:
There are more enjoyable things to do! Or perhaps you’re just waiting to be in the right frame of mind for launching into action.
There are other tasks to do that are in your ‘comfort zone’ and therefore easier to do.
You may find the task a little daunting and not know where to start, particularly if the task is not
within your normal skill set – yes, even Eagles can feel overwhelmed by challenging tasks!
Fear of failure – refer back to Section 1.3.
Just can’t get started – building up enough momentum to get the ball rolling can take unforeseen effort depending on the task.
You know yourself better than anyone – are you prone to procrastination? Why? Now, be honest with yourself here – understanding whether you are likely to procrastinate on particular types of tasks is vital to overcoming this period of inaction.
So, how do you deal with procrastination?
First of all, you will KNOW WHEN you are procrastinating on a particular task – just monitor your ToDo List or progress against your goal to see the impact of procrastination [goal progress monitoring is discussed in the next chapter]. The important thing is to ask yourself ‘why’ and then ‘how’. For example:
Motivate yourself by setting yourself a reward for getting it done and an even better reward for getting it done on time. Interestingly, most people feel bad when they procrastinate – that’s your subconscious telling you that you’re focusing on the wrong things. Your subconscious also rewards you for completing a task by the little buzz you get when it’s done – so in a way, completing a task is it’s own reward.
Remind yourself of the reason you set this goal in the first place – your big-picture, your motivation and your focus. Keep this in the forefront of your mind to motivate you to continue.
Combining your goal actions with your day-to-day routine action items will help as it will become
‘normal’ for a goal action to be part of your day-to-day routine.
Break down daunting goals into more manageable pieces so you can get some action under your belt. As you start to achieve results, motivation to continue will naturally follow.
Enlist the help of a mentor or support group to follow up on your progress.
Better still, when you are preparing your action plan, ask yourself whether each task is the type of task you’re likely to procrastinate on – if it is, make sure you give yourself every opportunity to be able to achieve it by scheduling it clear of other major tasks that may divert your attention.
At the end of the day, there is no magic solution to procrastination – you just have to bite the bullet and get into it.
“Bite the Bullet” “Just Do It!”
“Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today!”
There are numerous clichés you can use to illustrate the point. There are also some great motivational and inspirational posters available in the Internet (Free ones too) – find one that motivates YOU and hang it on your wall where you can see it every day. It’s all about attitude – embrace the power of positive thinking, and know that YOU are the only person who can make this happen!
Views: 17
© 2024 Created by Besimi.
Powered by
