As we near the end of another year; are you any closer to realising your goals this time round? Or do you feel disillusioned, where you feel like you have given your all, spent the year frantically busy, but your results indicate that you have, just been spinning your wheels, yet again. You feel trapped on a hamster wheel of constant frantic activity, overwhelm and discontentment, where each year seems to just blend into the next one and nothing seems to change. Benjamin Franklin said it so well when he said “Don’t confuse motion with action”
I want to offer you some practical tools and tips, to help you to finally break free from this frustrating cycle of discontentment and frustration. Your current ineffective, unproductive and inefficient daily routines are clearly not working; it is now time to build a new success habit set that will serve you better and allow you to turn your time and effort into success.
Go back to basics and address, these few crucial issues:
· Create a clear vision of what you want to achieve each year.
· Create momentum and direction, by turning this vision into a set of clearly defined goals.
· Prioritise and choose only one banner goal or huge hairy audacious goal, which would completely change your life if you achieved it.
· This one goal is all you are going to focus your energy on this year.
· Break this goal back into a number of smaller, bite size projects. These projects make achieving your banner goal feel possible. As you move through the year and complete each project, you move one step closer to creating the life of your dreams.
· Break your year back into four 90 day segments.
· Choose three projects to complete during each 90- day segment. The secret to finally begin to see results is to focus all your energy on a maximum of three projects at a time.
· Break each project back and build an action list of individual actions. These are individual actions you can take every day that will help you to complete each project.
· These action lists are your source documents and are the foundation of this process I am going to describe to you.
Now that you have documents detailing exactly what needs to be done every day, it is time to develop a daily routine that will help you to consistently carry out these actions. There are three major issues you need to address, to ensure that you actually get to make a difference in your life from this moment forward. The first one is time in your schedule every day, to carry out the actions from your action lists. The second one is a set of guidelines or routines, to help you consistently take the actions every day and finally you need to measure your performance, daily, weekly and monthly, to ensure that the actions you are taking, are indeed delivering the desired results.
Meet Your Future
This is a really simple concept, where you schedule time into your itinerary every day to carry out the activities from your action lists. Each Sunday, during your weekly planning session, set time slots aside every day, in your dairy, to finally start working on your goals. These are unchangeable time slots that are penned into your dairy and nothing short of a fire or major crisis can change them. When you are meeting your future every day, close your door, disconnect your telephone and ensure that nothing can disturb you. This is your special time where you work on your future and a crucial part of the reason why next year, is going to finally result in progress. By strictly adhering to this one principal, you will finally start to see results and within a reasonable time you will eventually realise your banner goal and completely change your life.
Code of personal Achievement
This is a daily commitment that you make with yourself to carry out five crucial tasks, which will promote your success and allow you to develop a new success habit set. Look at your banner goal and identify five actions, which if you carried them out every day, would help you to achieve it. Now introduce these into your daily routine and apply sufficient willpower, to ensure that you carry out all five of these activities every day. Your head must never hit the pillow each night until these five activities are complete. How you choose to introduce these new daily routines into your life depends on your own unique circumstances. You could either use the time set aside each day to “Meet Your Future” to carry out these activities or you could make them a part of your normal daily schedule. I have found both have their place and depending on what you are attempting to achieve, either can serve you.
Science has shown that it takes about 90 days for any new activity that you repeat, to become part of your habit set. It will thus take substantial willpower initially to carry out these five activities, but over time, as you get closer and closer to the 90 days, the activities will just become part of your habit set. After each 90 days passes and you will have replaced your old unproductive habits with a new success habit set. If you apply this principal in your life, you could have introduced 20 new success habits into your life each year. Imagine how your life will transform, with 20 new success habits introduced each year.
Performance Management System
Whatever gets measured gets done. This is a simple system that starts during the planning process. A set of measurement criterion are established, to measure your progress, daily, weekly and monthly, to assess if the actions you are taking are keeping you moving in the right direction you want. If your actions are delivering the outcomes you want, keep doing them if not then have the foresight and courage to change them for ones that do. This is an on-going and never ending process of Plan, Do, Review and Improve. As the year progresses, keep repeating this cycle until you complete each project.
This system I have described above is really simple and easy to do. The only challenge you have is that as easy as this process is to do, so easy is it not to do. Make a different choice this year and give this a try, I guarantee you will enjoy far better results if you do.
Author: Andrew Horton Time Management
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