One of the first things that I do every morning is review my current goals page in Evernote. It’s a simple page that I use to breakdown all of my goals for the week and month, as well as a small portion of my goals for the year. It looks like this:
This week’s Goals:
- Complete all todos, restart my chain
- Yoga
- Morning Ritual Starts Again
This month’s Goals:
- Complete 1k words per day exercise at least 70% of the time.
- Do my morning ritual consistently, stop being lazy in the mornings.
- Write… Everywhere.
Current Year Goal Focuses:
- 100 Books Read in the Year
- 240,000 words written
- Spanish at a level B2.
- Exercise 4 out of 7 days of each week.
Current Year Goal Focuses is a little bit different than Current Year Goals. My goals for the year is actually a much larger list, some of which are one off experiences or things that I should passively achieve. This is a tiny segment of that which either needs attention or I need to remind myself of. I stopped reviewing the entire list every morning because I found that it split my focus up too much.
I’ve mentioned before that I feel like a major reason that most people never get anything done is that they forget about their goals altogether in day to day life. It’s easy, life is hectic. So by taking the 15-30 seconds every morning and reading through this I’m reminded of what I’m supposed to be focusing on. Immediately after reviewing this I’ll look at my tasks for the day and make sure that at least a few of them address the larger goals.
If you don’t have something like this give it a shot. I’m sure you came up with some New Years Resolutions without a problem, so just take those and make them more granular, break them down into what you’d need to do monthly, then break that down into weekly and daily tasks. Then write it all down, review it every morning, and be amazed when you actually get it all done.
It’s cool that you’re aiming to write 240,00 words. Definitely achievable — you just gotta keep chipping away at it.
I don’t have a concrete words goal for the year, in part because I don’t have an easy way to keep a tally of how many words I’ve written. How do you keep track?
I do nearly all of my writing in scrivener, you can set it up to notify you when you hit a writing target for the day and quickly pull up totals for an entire project. So I’ve been focusing on daily word targets more than anything else.
Eventually ill probably create a google doc to track it more exactly.