Written Goals are Real Goals!
7 August, 2007 - General Business - 4 Comments
While I was in America earlier this month, my business partner and I took a few hours one evening to write our ‘plan for success’ for the next 12 months.
In the plan, we included our own personal goals, both financial and others. We laid out how many customers (for each particular service we offer) we want by August 08. We outlined things we want to do throughout the year (I would like to do some public speaking, for example) and we also outlined a bunch of ways that we would like to market our company.
We then put down some deadlines for some of the goals that we had wrote down, and we intend to map out a timeline for everything that we discussed.
After spending a few hours writing and discussing this plan (I say writing. It was just a basic set of notes inside Notepad) I realised how important it was to do this on a semi-regular basis.
I’ve heard the claim many times from people who say that mental goals are worthless and that we must write down our goals. The reasons? Well, apparently by writing down our goals, it forces you to visualize them as well as the end result of reaching those goals, and it also creates a form of commitment. Despite this, according to Goal Setting Guide, only 5% of us actually write down our goals and dreams.
I can tell you that after Paul and I had finished for the evening, the next 12 months suddenly felt a whole lot clearer. I knew what I had to achieve, and I knew how I was going to get there. Over the next month, I intend to start doing things to knock off, one by one, the goals (both large and small). I’ll start by creating a 12 month timeline from August 07 to August 08.
When you have written goals, and written methods of achieving those goals, your day to day running of your business suddenly becomes a whole lot easier.
Without those written goals, you’re a drunk at 3am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. As you walk, you stumble to each side of the path and you eventually fall off the path and lose sight of it. By not writing down what you want to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it, you start to go in all sorts of directions and it takes twice as long to reach your goal as it should have, if you even reach your goal at all.
By writing down your goals, as well as a method to reach each goal, you suddenly sober up. You might have a headache from all that writing, but you can walk straight and sure.
Do you write down your goals? If you do, do you write down a path to reach that goal?
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Posted on 7 August, 2007 by Jamie Harrop
Filed Under General Business |
4 Comments»
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I know what you mean. Without to-do lists, I run around in circles. Once I make the list though, I don’t have to worry about juggling all of the items in my head alone.
Oh, to-do lists are another fun thing. I use plenty of them too. If you didn’t see it, Jason, you might enjoy this post that I published in June. http://www.jamieharrop.com/2007/06/13/do-you-list-i-do/
I tend to make more short-term lists, where I write down what I need to do today, this week or by the end of the month. It helps me focus on one thing at a time, because I usually take a few moments to write down the items in order of importance.
I can’t say I have ever written down a path to achieving my goals. Although I write down ideas about the goals when thinking about them, so I guess that would be a very basic path.
[...] all know that written goals are real goals, but as is often the case, we tend to forget to practice what we preach. Today, I’m going to [...]