How to Achieve Your Goals

I have many goals for this year, such as earning $1000/month from passive income (as a part of my 10,000/euros month major goal), growing this blog even more, and read 50 books. I have a lot of dreams, but a huge view of reality at the same time.

There’s no way I’m going to do all of this without an effective plan of action.

Yes, because at the end of the day it’s what we actually did that matters, not how much we thought about doing it. It sounds simple in words, yet I know how much self discipline is needed to take action.

But it doesn’t need to be hard

You see, it’s not written anywhere that you have to kill yourself to achieve your goals. Indeed I developed a simple method for achieving my goals that will probably do wonders for you too.

Three new hours per day

With this simple method I increased my productivity and effectiveness by 500% in one week. I did so by simplifying and decluttering my todo list.

There are two fundamental steps to take if you want to increase your productivity and effectiveness. Everything else is bullshit without these two rules, so pay attention. The first one is to identify what you have to do. And the second one is to find the time to take action.

Knowing what to do

Let’s first talk about the first step. Identifying what you need to do.

The Pareto rule states that 20% of your efforts are responsible for 80% of your results. That means that if you worked 8 hours today, 2 of those hours were responsible for 80% of your today’s accomplishments. Don’t worry tough, I’m not going to ask you to leave your day job today.

Now let me show you a practical application of this rule. Let’s say that you have 10 goals for this year: eating healthy, start a business, become fit, start a blog, etc. There’s no way you are going to accomplish all of those things all at once. Forget it. Instead you have to choose the two most important goals and focus on those.

How to chose? Which one or two of those goals would have the greatest impact in your life if they were already accomplished?

Finding the time

Now comes the interesting part, finding the time to work on your goals. Let me tell you in advance that you have to make a choice. You have to choose which activities you are going to stop doing in order to find enough time to work on your goals.

The secret to productivity is to allocate a big enough chunk of time each day for working on your goals. And the best way to do that is by having a schedule. Like when you are at work.

For example to work on my goals I developed the following schedule:

• 6.00 – 7.00. Writing. In this time I sit down and write articles like this one. It’s incredible how more productive I am when I write in the morning. The number one activity that produces the most important results for my blog is writing, so it makes sense to me to focus my time and energies on creating powerful content every day.


• 13.30 – 14.30. Working. During this time I work on my business. Right now I’m working on a web application, so I make sure that I spend this hour exclusively working on that. I’m not going to make any money without a real business, so I have to work on that.


• 21.00 – 22.00. Reading. Reading is extremely important for me, so in the evening I do just that. If I want to read one book per week, I have to read nearly one hour per day, every day. I usually split the number of pages of the book in five parts, so I know how much pages I have to read each day, and if I finish to read earlier, I go to bed earlier.

I consider this schedule to be highly productive. Three goals per day are certainly a lot of work, but they can be done. You can do the same if you want. You can get up at six if you go to bed early, and you probably can find an hour during your lunch break to work on your goals.

But what’s even more interesting, is that you can just start with one hour per day. To say the whole truth, you actually have to start with just one hour per day.

You can develop a similar system for yourself. Start with one hour, preferably in the morning, and focus on the number one goal you want to achieve this year. Identify the number one activity that will provide the greatest chances of achieving your goal, and do just that.

Conclusion

The Pareto rule is essential for increasing your effectiveness, but it’s nothing if you don’t have the time to work on your goals. If you start today with a system like this one, you’ll achieve great things in no time. Give it a try for one month.

Posted on February 01 2010

You should subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Sharing is sexy!