Do you want to make 2016 your best and most successful year ever? Stay tuned and I will tell you how to make your 2016 goals a reality with four very practical and easy-to-do tips.
Tips for Reaching Your 2016 Goals
Focus on your most important goal of 2016 and develop the skills necessary to achieve it. Manage your time by prioritizing tasks and develop the habit of completing your most important task first thing in the morning.
1. Write down your goals
Ask yourself where you want to be at year-end in each of the seven life areas: physical, financial, professional, relational, spiritual, personal, and philanthropical. Imagine your ideal without second guessing yourself or judging how you would achieve your desired outcome, result or circumstances.
Write down at least 3 goals for each of the seven life areas and select the top goal of each one for a total of 7 primary goals. Now, reverse engineer your year plotting along the way what skills you will need to acquire, people and resources you would need to employ, and tasks you would need to do, in order to attain your goal within your specified time frame. Research has shown that the odds of reaching your goals are 43% more likely by just writing them down, and 73% more likely to be achieved if you not only write them down but list sub-tasks necessary for each goal.
2. Focus on achieving your key skill
Assess which one goal would quantum leap you the most in all areas and then ask yourself, “What one skill will help me the most to achieve this goal?”
Think about all of the skills that you have and determine what skill is missing to move the needle of your life the most. Focus on learning that one skill and then focus on achieving that one goal before moving on to the next one, and so on.
In their book The One Thing, authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan direct the reader to find the domino goal, that one thing in each life area, that when achieved will make the most impact and to focus on that one goal before moving on to the next. The key thing to ask yourself, they recommend, is “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
3. Manage your time well
After you write down the individual tasks necessary to complete your goal, schedule each task on a quarterly or monthly basis and then calendar each item in each given week or day as you work your way through the year.
I keep a master task list for each life area just to get them out of my head and written down. I then transpose each task to my goals list and then calendar each item chosen to do when I sit down to plan my week ahead. Remember, what gets calendared, gets done. Use my various calendar tools found on my resources page, beginning with the year-view Master Calendar Template in Excel or PDF format.
4. Make goal achievement a habit
If you follow the system described above, you will soon find yourself habitually jumping on your most important task of the day first thing in the morning and disciplining yourself to work on it until it is done before moving on to the next one, and so on… what Brian Tracy calls Eat That Frog. After while, this methodology will become your modus operandi day in and day out. You can’t help but achieve your goals in priority order, beginning with the one which will make the most impact on your life by years-end.
If you do follow these four tips, I promise that you will have great success in 2016 and develop great habits for years to come.
Please visit my resource page and download my Personal Strategic Plan template to help you get started with your 2016 goals.
Join the conversation below to let me know your 2016 goals. If you want to join the Tom Hart Success Series Community, visit my website to receive email notifications of new blog posts, learn of upcoming events, and other news by clicking on the offer to receive the first two chapters of my book Getting From Here To There for FREE!! (A great tool for goal setting and goal achievement).
