Happy 2018! I hope you had a great time closing out 2017 and transitioning into the new year.
I know I did. Although I didn’t do much, I really enjoyed the holidays. Here were my highlights:
- Seeing the 49ers go 5-0 in their last five games of the season.
- Spending time with my family.
- Getting a really nice pillow for Christmas. It has seriously changed my life.
- Getting a jump rope for Christmas that’s been really fun, making it much easier to consistently work out.
- Enjoying warm coffee, cozy clothes, and colder days (although I wish it got colder here in SoCal).
Like I said, nothing crazy, but exactly what I wanted.
Now it’s time to get back into the swing of things. Although I took a few weeks off from writing, I’m happy to be back! So let’s get to it.
Control Your Life
I’ve always been interested in controlling my life. You know, being able to get what I want.
Fortunately, I was pretty young (in high school) when I started believing this is possible. After reading the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, I realized I could learn anything I want – I just need to find the info and put it into action.
That led to a long journey of self-improvement that has benefited my life greatly. Of course, it didn’t all go smoothly and there’s still a lot more I want to improve and accomplish.
So today, I want to talk about accomplishing goals. But I’m not going to tell you how to figure out what you need to do, for a few reasons:
First, those answers are usually much simpler than we make them out to be:
- To lose weight, eat fewer calories than you burn every day.
- To build muscle, lift heavy things.
- To make friends, go where other people go and practice making connections with them.
Second, I don’t know what your exact goal is. Since only you know that, you need to learn how to figure out how to get what you want. It’s a great skill to have. (In the next few weeks I will show you how to apply this to make new friends.)
However, putting these into practice is where it gets tricky. Eating fewer calories to lose weight can feel like torture. Making time to hit the gym after a long day of work can seem impossible.
I’ve found a good system that works for me. Hopefully, it can help you too.
Why Have Goals?
To quote Tony Robbins, “You can’t hit a target if you don’t know what it is.”
If you want to accomplish anything, you need to know what it is you want so you can figure out how to get it.
Essentially, you are looking at your current life, figuring out how you want it to look in the future, and setting that change as your goal.
If you currently have a $50,000 salary and want to increase it to $100,000 in the next five years, that’s your five-year goal.
Once you’ve determined your goals, you need to figure out how you’re going to achieve them.
What Most People Are Doing Wrong
A lot of people have dreams, desires, and goals that they want to accomplish. But they don’t write them down or figure out what they need to do to achieve them.
For example, they know they want to increase their salary, but it’s just a hopeful thought that floats around in their head.
They don’t write it down. They don’t sit down and determine all the possible ways of doing it. They don’t research whether it’s a realistic goal (determining the average salary, talking to their boss, looking for other jobs they could perform that pay better).
Maybe that’s alright with them. Sure, they want to get to $100,000 in five years, but if they get 10% raises every year and end up at an $80,000 salary, they’re okay with that.
But what about those who actually want to create the life they desire? Do you want to be more likable? Do you want to have more friends? Do you want to have a best friend who’s there for you no matter what?
Let me show you what I’m doing to stay on top of the important parts of my life.
Tracking Your Time and Staying on Top of Goals
I recently listened to this episode of Nat Eliason’s podcast Nat Chat and absolutely loved it. It was perfect timing too because I’m really trying to find ways to manage and track my time better, and they covered that exact topic.
I want to highlight some of the points they brought up and what I’m doing to keep me moving towards my goals:
- Break your goal down into 15, 30, or 60-minute chunks. If your goal is a five-year goal, break that into smaller chunks until you know what you need to do for the next month or quarter. Then, take that smaller goal and break it down into small chunks of an hour or less. This may seem tedious, but many tasks are repeatable (writing a chapter of a book may take 30 hours, but you can make it, “Write chapter three for one hour,” done 30 times). You won’t know exactly how long things will take; just take your best guess. You will review and adjust it later.
- Put those chunks on your calendar. Only set a goal you think you can manage.
- Track your time. Most people look back on their days or weeks and think they worked really hard. In reality, they often spend much less time on the things that matter than they think. Did you work on the chunks you planned on doing? When you track your time, you can objectively look back and see what you did and decide what you want to change.
- Create a daily yes/no checklist. Think of all the things you want to do every day. Maybe you want to write for an hour, exercise for 45 minutes, meditate for 15 minutes, start conversations with five people in the office, keep in touch with at least two friends via text, whatever. Find a way to track whether you did or didn’t do each item. All answers should be yes or no. This will help you see if you are actually doing the things that are important to you.
It takes some planning to move forward with this, but once you’re set up it’s easy to maintain. To make it easy, just start with one thing that’s important to you. Break it down, put it on your calendar, and track it.
After some time you’ll start to see where your estimates were off. Maybe it takes you a lot longer to plan your food for the week than you thought. Increase the time needed on your calendar.
Review your daily checklist. Are you accomplishing what you expected to? If so, great. If not, how come? Did you bite off more than you could handle? Tone it down a bit to a manageable workload.
When you realize you’re accomplishing everything regularly, you can see if you think you should add to it. This is how you ratchet up your productivity. As long as you keep reviewing and tweaking, you’ll start finding the best balance for you.
Don’t forget to track when you’re unproductive too. When you see that you spent two hours on Facebook, you might realize that it wasn’t the best use of your time.
There’s nothing wrong with leisure time or doing things you enjoy that aren’t productive, but make sure it’s thought out. If you were hoping to work for two hours, but instead spent 90 minutes wasting time on the internet, you may need to make some changes.
Make it Fun
One last tip – do everything in your power to make it fun. You definitely don’t want it to be torture.
For example, losing weight is really hard for most people. For many years I’ve been holding about fifteen extra pounds that I definitely don’t want.
I’ve tried many diets (ketogenic, slow-carb, more frequent and smaller meals, etc.) to change my weight, but struggled to find any that work well and last. Until recently.
I knew I needed to eat fewer calories than I burn and I found a way to do that without killing myself.
With intermittent fasting (I eat all my food within an 8-hour period each day), reducing my calorie intake is much easier. Although I love breakfast, I have no problem skipping it and it helps tremendously.
I eat my lunch between 10:30 and 11:30 AM, which is about 600 calories. Then I wait until around 5:30 PM or so to eat a 1,200 calorie dinner. If I need a 200 or 300 calorie snack in between, no problem. This total is less than my target-weight maintenance requirement, plus I burn another 600 to 800 calories working out. Because of that, I can eat more on the weekends while still losing weight.
This only works for two reasons: I don’t mind the calorie deficit using this method and I enjoy my difficult workouts. For my exercise, I started jumping rope recently (thanks to these guys) and I love it. It’s the reason I keep doing it every day.
If you can’t find something you enjoy that helps you get to your goal, it’s going to be nearly impossible to achieve. If it’s not fun, it’s not sustainable.
Recap
If you want to accomplish your goals, you need put forth the necessary effort. Follow these guidelines to stay on top of your goals.
- Break your goal down into 15, 30, or 60-minute chunks.
- Put those chunks on your calendar.
- Track your time.
- Create a daily yes/no checklist.
- Find a way to enjoy your daily tasks.
- Review and tweak your tasks as needed.
That’s it. I’ve noticed that the better I get at this, the better I get at accomplishing my goals. It will absolutely be the same for you.
Let’s make 2018 the year we take control of our lives.