How To Set and Achieve Your Goals: Effective Goal Setting – Part 2

This post is part 2 of How To Set and Achieve Your Goals: Effective Goal Setting.

If you haven’t already read the previous post, check that out here.

Approaching Your Goals

There are two core approaches to achieving your goals that I want to discuss. One is of more value and often more effective than the other, but they aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they work better when used in conjunction. Utilise both for maximum impact.

Daily Habits

The first method of approaching your goals is by breaking them down into daily habits.

If your goal is to put on 10 pounds of muscle, break that down into manageable daily habits. These could be eating more protein and ensuring you lift weights weekly.

Or, if your goal is to learn a language, create the habit of learning for 20 minutes each day. When doing this, make sure the habit is relevant to the goal and that the goal is relevant to your life.

You can find some tips here about sticking with positive habits, or here about habit creation.

Break It Down

Whether you use habits or not to achieve your goal, consider using the following method. Doing so will improve your ability to make consistent progress.

‘Breaking it down’ is about taking the big, ambitious goal and dividing it into manageable chunks. You could use these chunks as milestones or actionable steps. Either way, I’d encourage you to break those down further.

Take each chunk or milestone and split that into 5-10-minute tasks. You might find it easier to start with the smallest possible step that you can take right now.

Want to read 50 books in a year? That doesn’t begin with reading 1 book, 1 chapter or even 1 paragraph. It starts with a single word. That is where you begin.

Goal-setting in this sense is about the decision to start. Instead of sitting down to watch TV, pick up a book and read one single word. That’s all you have to do.

The daily commitment

I learnt an approach to goal-setting from a person I met about two years ago, which has stuck with me ever since. Set your goal following the methods above, and make sure the goal is important to you.

Now commit to doing 10 minutes of work towards that goal every day. After 10 minutes, you have permission to stop, but you have to make progress each day. Often, with this approach, you’ll find that you want to work for longer than 10 minutes, which is amazing.

The main benefits here are working on the ability to get started and making regular progress. No matter how tired or unmotivated you are, using this approach will help you to begin.

Marginal Improvements

Back to the topic at hand. To achieve your most ambitious goals, all you need to do is break them down into the smallest possible action steps. Then take those steps.

Combine this with the theory of marginal improvements for a better outcome. Marginal improvements is where you change something small in your life that will have a significant result over time.

A good example of a marginal improvement is changing how you spend your daily work commute. If you listen to music on your way to work, try listening to audiobooks or language tapes instead.

One way to help with keeping this on track is removing the possibility to listen to music. Delete music apps and all songs from your phone. Install Audible instead and download relevant content. I’m sure you’d rather listen to an audiobook than to sit in silence for half an hour.

Use them both

To achieve our goals, we can combine the two. Use both marginal improvements and taking the smallest possible step.

Place a book on your TV stand so that you’re more likely to read instead of watching TV. Then, use the smallest possible step of reading a single word to motivate you to get started.

If you can’t take action towards your goal, or feel overwhelmed, you need to break the goal down further. Set actionable steps and sub-goals, which consist of tiny actions. These will add up to significant results over time.

Take the goal of writing a 1000 page novel for example. Approaching this head-on will be difficult and motivation will be sparse.

Instead, start with writing a 5-page short story this week, or a 500-word short story today. Once you achieve this sub-goal, increase the goal slightly and reach that goal. Think back to the archery analogy from earlier.

You can apply this same break it down theory to your long-term goals. Take your long term goals and divide them into medium-term goals. Divide those into short-term goals.

Short-term goals are then split into actionable chunks, which you break down further into small 5-10-minute tasks.

Goal-Setting Resources

Below are some useful apps and services that I’ve tried which will help you to set, track, and achieve your goals:

Strides – A simple, easy to use habit and goal tracker
Habitica – A fun alternative to Strides which makes habit building a game
Beeminder – Offer up a tribute which is paid if you don’t make regular progress towards your goal
Todoist – A virtual To-Do list with useful structure functionality. Todoist can be adapted to write your goal’s action steps instead of To-Do tasks.

I prefer to use physical resources like a whiteboard or journal for tracking my progress. But, these online resources are still useful.

Conclusion

Goals and goal setting are necessary for achieving our desired lives. If your goal doesn’t excite and motivate you, it’s not an effective goal. That’s the core of it.

You can read this post and learn about different techniques and approaches. But, if you don’t feel excited, inspired, or motivated to take action towards your goal, you likely won’t make much progress.

To help with this, break your goal down into micro-steps and remind yourself of your goal daily. Create a vision board and affirm to yourself that you’ll achieve your goal. Believe in yourself!

Thanks for reading.

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