Goal personal planning setting success – How To Align Your Your Daily Goals to Your Life Purpose
You know it’s important to have a long term vision and make sure that your short term goals and actions all line up to support this vision. Yet when you’re in the daily hustle and bustle, it’s so easy to loose sight of your long term pans and get pulled into short term fixes. You need to try a new approach to managing your time…
Traditional time management techniques encourage you to use a variety of tools to make sure you fit in all the tasks you have to do.
To-do lists are effective at managing your time on a daily basis but they don’t help you to decide where it is important to spend your time. More advanced techniques encourage you to link to-do lists to your goals and to prioritise your actions. This is better but you still don’t get a long term perspective.
Calendars and appointment books are good at making sure that you don’t forget to do things in the future. Typically they are used to record meetings and events that you have to attend and you don’t end up allocating time to those important but non-urgent activities that are needed to support you long term vision.
Most of these tools are used on a daily basis. If you want to achieve your dreams and long term goals you need to go beyond simple time management and start managing yourself. One very simple approach can make a tremendous difference in helping you to link your daily activity to achieving your long term goals.
Seven is Better than One
Change to planning 7 days at a time rather than just planning on a daily basis. Simply incorporate your activity planning into your weekly routine.
Why is this beneficial?
1. There are some days when you simply have to attend to urgent issues like crises at work. If you plan 1 day at a time, any important long term activities that you intended to follow get dropped.
If you plan over 7 days, you have far more time to plan with, you can make allowances for urgent issues by not planning every hour of every day. You will need to work out how much ‘spare’ time you need for your specific situation. You will need less spare time as you become better at long term planning and pre-empting crises!
2. You have multiple roles in your life – you have a job or a business, you have family commitments, you are part of a community, you have your own personal development to look after, you need to spend time refreshing yourself and recovering…
Each of these roles needs time, however over the course of any one day you may find that you only have the time to work on one of the roles – for example you may have a particularly heavy day at work so that’s the only area you work on.
In contrast, over the course of a week, you are very likely to spend time in all your roles. When planning over the course of a week you can recognise this and make sure that you plan to make progress in all the areas of your life. You will be able to balance all the different demands in your life more effectively.
You’ve seen the benefits of planning your week rather than planning over the course of a day. It enables you to plan to do all the important things that are necessary to ensure that you make progress towards your life goals while allowing time to deal with the daily plethora of crises and other urgent issues that need your attention.
The best way to implement a weekly planning cycle is to set aside a couple of hours on a specific day to do this. You weekly planning is an opportunity for self management that should not be missed. One of the best ways to implement weekly planning is to set aside time on one of your weekend days – I choose to do this on a Sunday. Spend a few minutes reviewing the previous week and then lay out the schedule for your next week.
Would you like to learn more about goal setting, personal planning and success?
Related keywords for this page:
php,programming,application
