New Year, New Goals: Breaking it down

by Nicole Relyea
January 7, 2014

Everyone is talking New Year’s Resolutions right now. While it might seem a bit cliche to set resolutions, now is as good a time as any to set goals for yourself and your business.

But even more importantly, you need to break that goal down into steps, so that you can evaluate whether your goals are realistic, and create a plan to follow through. Resolutions are great, but often stay in the realm of intention. This is why we think goals and action plans are better.

Why Resolutions Often Fail
At this time of year, many of us are filled with optimism - as well we should be. We start dreaming of all the lofty things we want to accomplish, thinking “I’ve got a whole year to do this!” While that optimism is great, it’s also important to ensure that our goals are realistic and attainable. If we set unrealistic goals, we will get overwhelmed or give up when we don’t see progress toward them.

How to evaluate whether your goal is realistic
One of the easiest ways to determine whether your goals are realistic is to work backward from the end goal, breaking it down into smaller and smaller steps. Start with your end goal, then ask yourself what you would need to accomplish each quarter in order to get there. Break each quarter down into monthly goals. Break each month into weekly goals. Once you’ve broken those down, write out 2-3 action steps with deadlines for each.

Going through this exercise accomplishes several things:

1) It will help you to get started, because there will be a couple of small steps to take right away. 

2) You’ll have a step-by-step action plan, which will help you to stay on track, keep your focus, and prevents that feeling of “I don’t know what to do next!”

3) Each week, month, and quarter, you’ll be able to compare what you’ve done to your plan - it’ll be easy to see your progress!

4) In the process, you’ll find your weak spots. You may find areas where you’re going to need help, have knowledge gaps, or you may realize that a goal is simply unrealistic and that you need to re-evaluate it.

Say, for example, that your goal is to make $100,000 next year. So if we break that down, that means you’ll need to generate:

    $25,000 per quarter
    $8,333 per month
    $2,083 per week

Now, if your business is already earning, say, $1,800 per week, this may be realistic. But if you’re currently only at $400 per week, that’s a pretty huge increase, and may not be realistic. In this case, you need to re-evaluate your end goal.

The Shift Workspaces team took a full day last week to sit down and discuss our goals for 2014. There’s some big growth in our future, and it was a huge task. But we used exactly this process, talking about what needed to happen by the end of the year, and working backwards.

Once we had broken everything down to what needed to happen each week, we adjusted our goals. A few of our goals were too small, and we recognized we could have greater growth than we expected. A few were simply going to be unattainable, and we had to scale back our expectations and come up with creative ways to make up the difference. We each walked out with specific tasks, deadlines, and a sense that we all knew exactly what we needed to do to be successful this year.

Once you’ve gone through the planning process, we’d love to hear how it works for you. Was it helpful? Do you feel empowered to accomplish your goals?

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