It’s very easy to get overwhelmed while working to meet your goals. This is particularly true if you take on too many “life-changing” goals, or if you make your goals too complicated. Overly ambiguous goals can cause problems as well. Here’s how to simplify things to avoid getting overwhelmed.
Defining Your Goal
The number one thing to do in this situation is to define your goal. Spell out exactly what you want to do. Pretend that you’re a project manager and need to tell your employees what they need to do – and they weren’t in the goal-setting meeting. Exactly what are you trying to achieve? Be as specific as possible.
Turn It into Smaller Steps
Once you’ve defined your goal, make it into easily achievable steps. You don’t need to make each step complicated – in fact, the more steps (and smaller steps at that) – the better. How will you accomplish your goal? What do you need to do? Remember the platitude that a “journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.” Your goals start out this same way. How do you begin? Once you do, what’s the next step to take? From there, begin to develop a plan of action.
Map Things Out
Now that you have a specific goal and a general plan, it’s time to make that map. You can map out your steps any way that you wish to. You can use a piece of paper, a computer program, a Word document, or anything that works well. All that matters is that you have a map that’s easy to reference. In fact, you can place your map at the front of your journal, or even glue it in. This way, you can track your goals and directly connect them to the steps.
Set Up a Schedule
Finally, you need to set up a schedule. This is the best way to stay on track, as long as you’re flexible. This schedule could be anything from “I’m going to meet this step of the goal in a month” to “I want this whole goal to be met in six months.” Having a time span to place things in will really make things realistic and ensure that you meet those smaller goals. However, you do need to be flexible and willing to adjust your goals should you run late on them.
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