Did you experience something like this in the past?
You have your kick-off meeting for the year to plan your goals with your supervisor. All went great, and it motivated you to take them on and kick it out of the park?
Then you get back to work and emails, meetings, updates of projects and so on dominate your work life.
Some months later you get reminded to fill-in your half-year review of your goals and you realize that you neither pushed them forward nor did you really remember them. Maybe they are even obsolete by now.
Especially the development goals for yourself fell completely off the table.
Why did this happen?
There is a “simple” solution to it. Review your goals daily.
Now this sounds simple, but building habits like this is surely not. We all have made commitments just to find out that we cannot maintain them. Be it about diet, exercise or business.
But if you don’t have your goals in front of you, you cannot direct your daily actions. And your daily actions bring you closer to your goals. Only the daily actions!
We achieve our goals not by one big giant leap but by many little things we do consistently over a long period. It is setting up the next meeting to get things organized. Follow up on a dropped ball to keep the project moving. Summarize your actions and determine what are the next steps and then get the first one done. All these little steps don’t seem to be important, but the sum of it surely does. Like we know from an older song from Depeche Mode “Everything counts in large amounts”.
My key trick for making me look into my goals was to make it obvious. I don’t have them somewhere in an electronic HR folder, which is impossible to find, but I have them written in my paper journal. This paper planner (I use the full-focus-planner by Michael Hyatt) sits in front of me on my desk all day. I take notes there and track my important to-dos in there, but most importantly I have my goals written there. Thus, i just need to open it in the morning while I start my laptop.
Make it easy and obvious to you too. Do you want to print it and put it in your cubicle or on the wall next to your desk? Do you use it as a screensaver or as the wallpaper for the desktop on your screen?
Build your habit to review them daily and then take actions to reach your goals.