Tag Achieving Goals

Stop Before You Start

Steve Keating 4 Comments

Geez, what happened to 2014? It went fast didn’t it? I hope it was a productive and prosperous year for you. I hope you kept all your resolutions and achieved all your goals. I hope!

Hope is nice but it’s no substitute for an actual plan.

If you’re like the vast majority of people, your resolutions were toast before you received your first paycheck in 2014. If you set goals your odds were somewhat better. If you set goals along with developing a plan for exactly how you would achieve them your odds of reaching them were actually pretty good.

If your plan included what you would stop doing in order to start doing something more productive then your odds of achieving your goals in 2014 were excellent.

Most of us are very busy people, we just don’t have much free time on our calendars. Yet when setting goals for the coming year we just add more to the mix. To be more successful we will start doing_____________. Go ahead and fill in the blank.

Do your goals for 2015 include starting new habits, starting new activities, starting new projects? Well that just isn’t realistic unless you first plan to stop doing something too.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve joined fitness clubs. I budgeted the money to pay for it, but not the time to use them. It was just one more thing that I didn’t have time to do. To be a bit more precise, it wasn’t that I didn’t have the time, I just didn’t make using the clubs a priority. To use them, I would have had to stop doing something else, I CHOOSE not to do that. It wasn’t really a concious choice but it was a choice just the same.

Unless you found yourself with an abundance of time in 2014 it’s foolish to add more to your “to-do” in 2015. Before you add anything new, take something off.

So let me suggest you begin your 2015 planning by making a “Stop-doing” list. A list of those “things” that you do which get you little or nothing in return. Make a concious choice about how you invest your time in 2015. Open up some time in your day to begin doing some new things that help you reach a goal.

Your success in 2015 might not determined by what you do; it may well be determined by what you don’t do any longer.

Will 2015 be Better for You?

Steve Keating 6 Comments

They are here! The “Holidays” have arrived. The days of the holiday season seem to go by much faster than the rest of the year. Before we know it 2015 will be upon us. Soon, people will be wishing us a Happy New Year and we’ll be hoping for a brighter 2015 for ourselves and those we care about.

Stop hoping. Start doing.

Now is the time to set goals for 2015 and the rest of your life. Research shows that 84% of people have no formal goals. They have plans, dreams, hopes and of course, the ubiquitous good intentions but not true goals.

True goals are written out objectives, along with an almost daily plan for how you will achieve those objectives. True goals are what high achievers use to get ahead. True goals are what successful people use to motivate themselves.

I could write pages on how to set goals but there is already enough info online that covers the subject better than I could. So here’s a different kind of help, a 2015 kind of help.

Here are three apps that can help you determine just how successful 2015, and the rest of your life will be.

GoalsOnTrack. Perhaps the most robust goal-setting app available, it allows you to record your goals, your personal motivations, start and end dates, sub goals, habits and most importantly, action plans.

It will sync with Google Calendar and Outlook and you can create goal templates within the app as well. It’s not the prettiest of the goal-setting apps but it’s very effective.

LifeTick. My goals are based on my Core Values. The beauty of this app is you begin the goal-setting process by defining your own core values, after all, these are YOUR goals.

Once you have determined your Core Values the app will walk you through the SMART goals process and then add the steps required to help you actually achieve the goal. It lets you keep track of your goal achieving activities and let’s you add notes too.

One big difference is that it is multi-user so others can be part of your goal setting process, this is great for couples. The big downside of this app is that it’s desktop based and in my experience life is mobile.

Strides. This is a great looking app and it has excellent dashboards. It’s like looking at your life on a Smartphone screen. This is more of a habit tracking program than a true goal-setting app but it understands that there are different types of goals and allows you to track the activities required to achieve them. It’s not free (3.99) and it is only available for iOS at the moment.

There are other apps you can check out, which one you choose matters less than the fact that at least your thinking about and planning your future.

Start now and take your time. Goal-setting can, and should be time consuming. You are after all planning the rest of your life. Research conducted by AAA says that the average person will spend 40 hours planning a two-week vacation. Research conducted by me says the average person will spend 0 hours planning the rest of their life.

Don’t be average!