Successful Time Management For Dummies. Zeller Dirk

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In This Chapter

      

Seeing the connection between goal‐setting and time management

      

Putting your goals on paper

      

Living and planning large

      

Finding the fastest route to achievement

      Today, more than at any time in history, you have limitless opportunities, especially if you’re living in the United States. However, having so many choices can lead to confusion, distraction, and wasted time. Achievement in anything in life takes focus, diligence, and patience. So the question arises: Can getting a handle on your most precious lifelong dreams and desires help you get more done on a day‐to‐day basis? Absolutely! Say, for example, you and your spouse have always dreamed of taking six months to travel the world while you’re still young enough to hoist a backpack. Such a focus may motivate you to put in extra hours or accelerate your sales quotas at work to build up the necessary funds and time for that adventure.

      Even long‐range goals can shape the way you use your time in the here and now. Suppose your goal is to retire to a modest cabin in the Smoky Mountains and spend the rest of your life writing the Great American Novel. Even if that goal is 30 years away, your priority now is more likely to be on investing your income and perhaps taking some writing courses rather than on building a 4,200‐square‐foot home and learning to ski – or it should be, anyway, because the preparations you need to make first and foremost are the ones that’ll enable you to build that cabin and have the money and time to write.

      Everyone has dreams and goals for the future. But in order to accomplish more in less time, to create a sense of urgency and command efficiency, having a clear sense of goals and purpose is critical. In this chapter, I guide you in the process of committing your goals to paper; categorizing, balancing, and breaking them down into manageable chunks; and allowing that powerful action to spur your productivity.

Understanding Why You Need to Put Your Goals on Paper

      Some studies calculate that only about 3 percent of goal‐setters document their aspirations. And I can assure you that these folks are the ones who have the most money, influence, power, prestige, freedom, and time to work toward their dreams. Why? Because, as numerous studies suggest, people who clearly define and write down their goals are more likely to accomplish them – and in a shorter time frame and more direct fashion. People who don’t clarify and write out their goals invest more time and accomplish less.

      When you take the time to write down your goals, you clarify them and sharpen your vision for attaining them, which allows you to do the following:

       ✓ Take control of your life. By identifying what’s most important to you and putting it on paper, you tell your brain that this isn’t a dream to be ignored as a hope‐to, wish‐to, or would‐like‐to. It’s really something for which you’re willing to invest time, effort, energy, and emotion.

       ✓ Map out the most direct route to achievement. When you put your goals in writing, you’re setting your sights on the destination before you begin. Your life goals become the framework for how you prioritize and manage your time. You begin the process of planning and strategizing about the steps you can take to achieve that goal. Your brain starts to look for the best, most direct route and the route with the lowest time investment.

       ✓ Limit detours. Ever hear the saying “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”? Problem is, if you head off on just any road, you’re likely to end up in a place you don’t want to be. By documenting your goals, you can more easily gauge whether an effort is likely to bring you closer to or further away from them. With your goals in front of you, you make fewer wrong turns and invest less time in trial‐and‐error dead ends. If you know that “be an outstanding father” is at the top of your written list, then overtime, extra assignments, travel, and other actions that take you away from your kids won’t distract you as easily; you know you’re more likely to achieve this goal by spending time with your kids, going to their games, taking walks, throwing a ball, playing dress‐up, going to the park, or writing a note.

       ✓ Stay motivated. Written goals fuel motivation, inducing you to perform at a higher level and at a faster rate in order to achieve.

Establishing Your Fabulous 50

      As you put together your list of goals, you need to consider the five core aspects of wants that I cover in this section. My mentor Jim Rohn taught them to me when I was in my 20s. These five questions dramatically reduced the amount of time I needed to achieve many of the goals that are now crossed off my goal sheets, and these same questions can help you expand your thinking so you can have more, be more, and achieve more.

      As soon as you finish reading this section, read no further until you get your goals on paper. Your task after reading this section is to come up with at least 50 goals that you want to accomplish within the next ten years. As you brainstorm your list of goals, keep a few points in mind to make your goal‐setting effective:

       ✓ Make sure your goals line up with your wants. Don’t evaluate goals based on what you think you need, deserve, or can realistically achieve; attack it by what you want. Your success is determined by how you invest your time each day.

       ✓ Think big. “Go big or go home” is a philosophy I encourage my clients and workshop participants to embrace. Many shy away from setting big goals for a range of reasons, from fear of disappointment to concern that they may not have the drive to pursue them.

      

If you approach your dreams conservatively – going after what you think is reasonable or realistic – your odds of getting beyond that are slim to none. But if you let your imagination go and pursue the big dream, the odds of reaching that level of joy and fulfillment are in your favor. Big goals and big dreams cause you to stretch, strain, and go for what you really want in life. They connect with the best use of your time and energy.

       ✓ Pick a time somewhere in the future and work backward from there. For any goal that stretches further than ten years, break it down into smaller goals with shorter time frames to increase your focus, intensity, and commitment. See the later section “Assigning a time frame to each goal” for details.

       ✓ Make your goals measurable. When you establish a measurable, quantifiable goal, you know you can’t fudge on whether you achieved it or not. You either hit the target or you don’t. You also know where you stand at any given time. Goal measurement naturally falls into two categories:

      • Number‐based goals: Measuring your progress toward a goal is pretty easy when the goal is number‐based. You know when you’ve acquired a million dollars or lost 30 pounds, for example. The bank statement or scale is pretty simple to read. As you craft financial and other goals that are associated with numbers, be specific. Do you want to earn a certain annual salary? To put away a certain amount of money each year? To run a certain number of miles by September?

      • Non‐number‐based goals: To measure a non‐number‐based goal, focus on how you’ll know when you’ve accomplished it. For example, will some organization’s seal of approval establish you as a world‐renowned archeologist? Will being elected president of the СКАЧАТЬ