You need to know where you are going and what matters to you. Come up with a plan how to achieve goals that matter to you. Break goals down, track plan execution by using specialised tooling, and be in control of your life.
Set and achieve the goal
Always ask questions “why”, do not believe in things that are “just the way they used to be many years”. Yes, something might have worked for a long time, but times change, so do the ways. Success depends on ability to grasp the feeling that “things changed”, so you are the first to act.
Follow this exercise to understand what matter for you. After you understand what you truly need, it is time to groom, plan, and start working towards this goal. There are myriads of available tools on the market to help you with tracking goals. The majority of these tools (Trello, Asana, Notion, etc.) let you collect to-do items under a certain topics and make the progression easier to track. Let’s break down the whole process of planning into steps.
- Groom your goal, make it SMART and break it down. Do not stress too much on properly defining all properties. The most important thing is that your goal is quite specific and that you believe in it.
- After you have a goal properly set, plan it. Break it down more and more, until you have clear sequence of actionable steps. This is when you fire up one the tools and set up proper board. The board usually consists of To do, In progress, and Done columns (names can be different), so you can move your small tasks across those boards. When you plan, you create tasks in To do column. When all tasks are moved into Done column, you open up champagne and fire up another board for you next goal.
- Execute the plan, start working towards the goal. Move those tasks to Done column. It is normal that some tasks depend on each other, it is normal that you will create more tasks along the way. The most important part is to move tasks and get closer and closer to your goal.
Task boards or No more polar nights
Let’s see the whole process of grooming, planning, and working on goals using a real-life example.
For the last decade or so, one of most inspiring goals for me was to move to Southern Europe. I love North, but cold weather almost entire year is not for everybody. It took some time to realise it and, if fact, this hidden desire was stopping me from making important decisions in life, as life was not satisfying enough (not buying a place to live was one of them). It took two years to complete it thanks to the board in Trello that I created back in 2022.
- Grooming – after the goal was set, I made it SMART. The criteria of done was “Move to Southern Europe by the end of 2023”. The goal was achievable, considering the time and resources allocated for it.
- Planning – task board contained four columns (the last one was just for some knowledge base things) where I outlined first tasks (choose the country, compare taxation regimes and legalisation options).
- Execution – honestly, I changed the country of choice three times, the plan did not go as it was planned in the beginning. I was creating more and more tasks to research different aspects of every country, even more tasks were deleted as irrelevant. However, the final decision (beautiful country Montenegro) was well-informed and balanced. Remaining ticket for the actual moving were easy to create and to complete. It was such a joy to finally complete all the tasks (this is when I took a screenshot and even posted it everywhere)!
Summary
Understand what drives you and what makes you excited. Not just know it, act on it. Formulate SMART goals, track them, execute the plan and be closer to destination you truly believe in.
After you came up with the goals, planned them, and started working on them, it is time to learn how to achieve them in the most efficient and focused way.
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