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amatyultareWe’re on the last week of our 31 Days of Goal-Setting challenge. Yesterday we set our New Year’s Resolutions for 2016 - very exciting! Today’s prompt is: Brainstorm - what do you need to accomplish in the next three months towards your goals for the year?
A year is a long time. It’s easy to procrastinate on goals that you’ll get to “sometime before next December”. Plus, it’s really hard to plan everything you’re going to do for the whole year in January. A three-month or quarterly timeframe is much easier to get your head around and gives you a built-in shorter deadline, making procrastination less likely.
(Side note: if you really like the idea of doing quarterly goal planning, you might like the book 12 Week Year. Some of the suggestions I’ll be making over the next few days originate from that book.)
It’s important to note that you shouldn’t try to work on all of your goals in a single quarter, and you certainly aren’t going to complete all of your 2016 goals in just three months. But for now, go ahead and think a little big. We’ll pare things down tomorrow.
One other word of warning - your three month milestone goals should be achievement milestones, and not simply “do X a certain number of times” unless your larger goals is centered entirely around activity X. For example, if your goal for the year is, “start conversations with strangers more often,” go ahead and make a quarterly milestone “talk to 3 strangers”. However, if your goal is something like, “make more friends”, your quarterly goal should not be “talk to three strangers” because that’s an activity, not an achievement. Instead, make your milestone something like “make one new friend”.*
*These examples are all far too vague and not SMART enough, but you get the idea.
A year is a long time. It’s easy to procrastinate on goals that you’ll get to “sometime before next December”. Plus, it’s really hard to plan everything you’re going to do for the whole year in January. A three-month or quarterly timeframe is much easier to get your head around and gives you a built-in shorter deadline, making procrastination less likely.
(Side note: if you really like the idea of doing quarterly goal planning, you might like the book 12 Week Year. Some of the suggestions I’ll be making over the next few days originate from that book.)
It’s important to note that you shouldn’t try to work on all of your goals in a single quarter, and you certainly aren’t going to complete all of your 2016 goals in just three months. But for now, go ahead and think a little big. We’ll pare things down tomorrow.
One other word of warning - your three month milestone goals should be achievement milestones, and not simply “do X a certain number of times” unless your larger goals is centered entirely around activity X. For example, if your goal for the year is, “start conversations with strangers more often,” go ahead and make a quarterly milestone “talk to 3 strangers”. However, if your goal is something like, “make more friends”, your quarterly goal should not be “talk to three strangers” because that’s an activity, not an achievement. Instead, make your milestone something like “make one new friend”.*
*These examples are all far too vague and not SMART enough, but you get the idea.
