Excited to accomplish your goals? Join the club. With so many things you want to be, do and accomplish in life, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But managing your goals — and achieving them with ease — can be a lot easier if you have some simple strategies in mind for success. Your goal is within reach if you follow these tips from Alvin Donovan, a disciplined and productive living-minded entrepreneur who made time management his top priority when he started out in business at just 25 years of age. Today, he has created a broad range of products that are sold into more than 40 countries with over $1 million in revenue per month - all while managing his own successful website design business.
"I've personally used dozens of other goal-setting methods, but each one had its own set of problems. With over 25 years experience in goal-setting, I developed my own set of generic and precise goal-setting methods that work for anyone. And they're all based on a simple principle: when you write down goals and make them measurable, you can stay motivated to take action."
Donald A Donovan
I encourage you to read this entire article because I believe there is a lot of valuable information to be gleaned from it. It's well worth your time. You'll find that this method works for me as well as it does for Alvin Donovan (the person who wrote the above article).
Here are some of the ideas that I learned from Alvin Donovan's article:
1. Your goals can really be broken down into three categories, not two.
You might think your goal is to build a lot of wealth or to get married or to live at an oceanfront penthouse. But this concept of "two goals" isn't really acceptable anymore amongst successful people. You don't just have goals in one area that you want to focus on at the expense of other areas or else you will fall short in those areas as well. For example, if you're focused on becoming wealthy and don't have a solid strategy to accomplish your goal of building wealth, then you probably won't get wealthy.
2. I expanded upon the 3 goals in this article to include a fourth and fifth goal - or "dimension."
The fourth goal is to become physically fit and look good in the process of achieving your first three goals. The fifth dimension is that you live a happy, healthy life and keep yourself mentally alert by getting some exercise each day.
3. You have to learn how to ask better questions so that you can get better answers . This is important because if you ask poor questions (e.g. "How can I become wealthy?") you will receive misleading answers (e.g. "Go to a bank and borrow your way to wealth.").
One of the best questions you can ask is: What should my priorities be right now? If you focus on your family and build a good relationship with them, then you'll always have a happy home life. If you focus on your health, then your body will stay healthy for the long term. You always have to evaluate whether something is important or not by asking yourself if it's important for a long time .
4. The most effective way of writing down your goals is to divide each goal into smaller steps so that you can see how easy it is for them to be accomplished . You have to constantly ask yourself what you can do today to move forward towards your goals.
5. Each of the above five goals is a "bucket goal" - something that you continuously have to evaluate and possibly dump out if they no longer apply to your goals and priorities. For example, if you become wealthy, then you might decide that you don't need to keep on investing in real estate or stocks. Or maybe as your family grows, it's no longer important for you to stay physically fit so much - now it's more important for you to spend time with your kids.
6. You should make sure that each of the five buckets are things that are quantifiable .