If you’ve been wondering how you can increase your productivity as an entrepreneur, you’re gonna love this simple first step that can quadruple your productivity in any given year.
Why Your Yearly Goal Setting Isn’t Working for you
First let’s talk about what we’re currently doing, and why it’s not working. Most people (you too?) set New Year’s Resolutions on January first. By March we’ve given up on half of them and are feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with the other half.
Am I close? 🙂
Take a look inside a gym the first week of January and again by April in any given year and you’ll see it’s not just you.
A big reason why this happens is that 365 days is just way too long of a window. With such a long term window it’s easy to procrastinate and think that waiting another week won’t really make a difference. One week quickly turns into two and, well, you know how the story goes. You’re likely living it 🙂
Instead of Yearly Goals Set Quarterly Goals
It’s great to have a yearly vision but when it’s time to set tangible goals, go for quarterly instead of yearly. This alone could quadruple your output in a given year. By simply shortening the “deadline” you’ll be able to stay motivated enough to take some of your projects to completion.
I first started doing this when I joined The 90 Day Year, a program by my mentor, Todd Herman and it’s had a really profound impact on my productivity.
As the title suggests, Todd teaches goal setting (and more importantly, achieving) a little different than the SMART goals you’re probably used to. For starters, we break the year down into 4 mini-years. And then take it a step further and break things down into what he refers to as 2 week “sprints”. (He comes from the sports world, so be prepared for the sport references and puns) 😉
Those short 2 week sprints allow you to have quick feedback on the activities you’re spending time on so you can tweak what’s not working or supercharge what is working really well. How many times have you re-evaluated something after way too long only to realize you probably should have pivoted months ago. Yeah, me too. :/
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Break Down Those Goals into Manageable Chunks
Some goals take longer than 90 days to achieve, so how do we reconcile this with setting 90 day goals?
What I love about the 90 day constraint is that it forces me to figure out how to break my huge goals down into mini-projects that I can fit into a quarter. I don’t know about you but the lofty goals are the most overwhelming sometimes, and having smaller goals that make up the biggie is really helpful for gaining some traction.
In my course, Create Passive Income with Ebooks, I show my students how to break down that huge goal of creating an Ebook into more achievable steps so that you can take action and minimize your tendency to procrastinate on it. “Write a book” doesn’t have to be a goal that only lives on your bucket list. You can actually get it done, dude.
You just need to have the finished ebook be the vision and break it down into manageable milestones that fit into 90 days.
The 90 Day Year is much more than a goal setting program. The frameworks Todd teaches are huge game changers when it comes to supercharging your productivity. If you’d like to find out more about The 90 Day Year and be notified when it opens, click below and I’ll let you know.
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I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. How do you set goals in your business and life? How’s it working for you?
