Setting Goals to Stay on Track
Since my coaching of entrepreneurs began over a decade ago, I’ve seen a lot of common pitfalls. One of the biggest is staying focused. It may seem simple, but with so many opportunities and different directions you could go in, makers, innovators, and entrepreneurs can easily lose sight of what they’re ultimately trying to accomplish as they begin working on more and more things.
In the consulting world, we refer to this as scope creep. You signed up for a specific scope of work, and the client keeps asking you to do a little bit more, creeping in on that initial agreement of work. In a scenario where you’re working for yourself, you are now the consultant and the client and have to manage your own scope creep by setting specific goals and sticking to a plan of action that moves you forward towards those goals. If you find that you’re working on something completely unrelated to those goals, you have to talk to yourself like you would a client and explain that the original scope of work you signed up for has to come first. After that, you can work on new projects.
I’m very guilty of giving in to my own scope creep - I love working on new projects. To stay on track, I set goals for the year and break them down, like this:
1. Write down the big goal that you want to accomplish in the next 2 to 6 months.
2. Next, write down three goals that you need to accomplish by the end of this month that will help you reach your bigger goal.
3. Then, create a plan of action for each week, that will get you to your three-monthly goals. By doing this, you can see what you must accomplish each day to achieve your bigger goals.
4. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you must check in with those goals each day. If what you’re planning on working on that day doesn’t directly get you closer to your goals, don’t do it. Instead, write down what you want to do, why, and then look at it again the following month when you’re ready to set your monthly goals again.
This exercise is simple but not easy. I would encourage you to set an alarm each morning or evening to check in on your action plan. That will help solidify the habit. Need a starting point? Head here to get my Focus & Goals workbook that you can download and try out. You can also learn more about how to set SMART goals, here.
Along the way, it may be worth taking stock of why you keep veering away from your goals. What challenges are you facing? What obstacles get in your way? Do you need to find more pockets of time? Are you on social media too much? Or maybe you just want to take some time to play a little bit. Taking note of what’s blocking you from working on your goals can help you come up with strategies to those obstacles out of the way. You can find some prompts to help you take inventory of those blockers in the same planning download, here.
Do you have strategies to stay on top of your goals? Here are a few other ways I stay focused. Let me know what they are in the comments below!