Instigator Blog

The Post-Thanksgiving Goal Writing Project is rolling along nicely. You still have till Sunday, December 3rd to submit your goals!

Meanwhile, a number of people have already written their goal posts and you’ll find a ton of great stuff! You’ll probably share many of these goals, and hopefully we can all help one another and inspire one another to success.

• Jonathan has 3 goals he wants to achieve. More than that, he’s written an excellent post on how you can go about reaching your goals.
• Curly is trying to start a new business but struggling with the fact that she’ll have to let something go in order to achieve her goals.
• She also has a more humorous (but still very interesting) goal to see how much imaginary money she can spend on unnecessary fripperies touted by retailers and advertisers. Her purpose is to shock herself into conserving cash and watching her holiday spending more carefully.
• Alan at Everything Internet Blog wants to lose 10 pounds. He’s highlighted some great goal setting tips as well.
• Ted Demopoulos is gunning to finish his audio CD and tips booklet titled, “101+ Tips for Blogging more Efficiently, Effectively and Profitably”
• Andrew Flusche wants to have a new website he’s developing out for beta testing. The site is designed to help contract lawyers (those that work on a contractual basis) find work with other lawyers; an online classified system for lawyers. Good luck Andrew!

There have been more submissions, but I don’t want to overload you!

Enjoy the list here, check out each person’s goals and please leave them a word of advice, a kind thought or a bit of encouragement. Grow the community around you and it will return value ten times over.

Set your goals today! From now until Christmas what do you want to get done? Post about it on your blog and link back here.

Don’t forget to subscribe for free to Instigator Blog via RSS. You can subscribe via email too! For more information, click here.

So far I’ve described the following goals:

• Meet 5 entrepreneurs and find ways to help them
• Start 2 new businesses
• Stay productive throughout the day and wake up earlier

Each of those goals is important, but they’re all related to work. And I can’t help but look at those goals and think, “There better be more there than just work stuff.”

And of course, there is.

One of my post-Thanksgiving goals is to be a better father and husband.

How exactly am I going to do that?

It would be easy to say “spend more time with my family”, and while that’s something I do want to achieve it has to be deeper than that. There have to be more actionable, smaller goals:

1. Stay focused on my family when I’m with them. There’s a difference between “time” and “quality time” — the latter being the one I want to emphasize. It’s no good to be sitting at home playing with my son if my mind is on work. He’s not getting the attention he deserves and I’m not benefiting from the time with him. Same holds true for my wife; spending quality time with her doesn’t mean sitting there watching TV like a zombie…
2. Work less at night. I want to wake up earlier so I can get work done while my family is asleep. At night, after we put my son to bed, I have a tendency to hop on the computer, start responding to emails, etc. It’s usually not the most productive time for me, so instead of flitting it away online, I’m going to try and turn the computer off and hang out with my wife.
3. Do more on the weekends. Do you ever get into this endless debate with your partner, “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know, how about you?” “Um…not sure, what do you want to do?” Let me scream for all of us: Aaaaaahhhhh! I’m going to work on finding more activities for the family on the weekend (which gets harder and harder as it gets colder and colder) so we can enjoy ourselves trying new things and having fun outside the house.
4. Keep some time for myself and ask for it. Precious “alone time” is so rare when you’ve got a family, but the biggest mistake you can make is not keeping any and not asking for it when you really need it. My wife and I often feel guilty about it; we just spent all week at work, our son was at daycare and on the weekend we want to take a few hours to ourselves? Gack! You selfish bastard! In the end it benefits everyone because the person enjoying the alone time gets to recharge his/her batteries big-time; and they bring more fun and happiness to the table after.

Every goal is important, but some are more important than others. Your health and your family should be paramount over your work. You can always find new work…a new body and family on the other hand…

We’ve all got goals. I’ve already listed three goals I want to achieve by the end of 2006.

But how can we actually achieve our goals?

With inspiration and insight from Jonathan George here are 9 steps for achieving your goals:

1. Write Your Goals Down. It’s always a good idea to put things down on paper. That way you can’t forget your goals or fake yourself out. Once it’s written, it’s written. Sure you could lose the piece of paper (or delete the file on your computer) but that’s pretty extreme. Writing things down helps put your goals in focus.

   Luckily, you can do that right now by participating in the Post-Thanksgiving Goal Writing Project! Write a blog post (or more) about your goals for the rest of the year and link it back here. You’ve got the rest of the week to do it!

2. Be Realistic But Don’t Be Chintzy. Jonathan makes a good point about being realistic with your goals. If you set your sights too high you’ll get disappointed quickly, and that’s no way to reach your goals. At the same don’t be chintzy with your goals either. If you set goals that are too small or too easily achievable you won’t get enough emotional benefits from them.
3. Visualize The End Result. Visualization is a powerful way of creating a positive view of your situation. Recently I’ve talked to a few people about visualization. They swear by it. The brain needs a mental picture of what you want to accomplish before it can be done.
4. Set Measurable Goals. It’s important to know what to use as a measuring stick for goal setting and achieving. Having something to compare your goals to gives you a clearer end point. You want measurable goals, not goals like, “I want to be rich in 6 months.” Make your goals as specific as possible, setup key indicators and measurement variables.
5. Create Milestones. Jonathan writes, “The ‘middle’ part of anything you’re seeing through to completion is always the hardest.” Some might argue that it’s the last 1% of something that’s the hardest, but Jonathan’s point is important. You need milestones along the way to achieving your ultimate goal, to avoid losing sight of the end goal and to celebrate the small successes along the way. It’s very hard to visualize the end of a long project without having milestones along the way.
6. Start Right Away. Destroy Excuses. You’re a busy person, you’ve got a ton on your plate. I know that. But achieving your goals won’t happen on its own. You need to start right away. You can do that by first destroying all excuses. There are no excuses (OK, sometimes there are, but you get my point…) If you’re too busy to achieve a goal, I would suggest figuring out why you’re so busy should be your first goal.
7. Manage Your Time Wisely. I love this quote from Jonathan, “Each and every one of us own 100% of our thoughts, time and results.” Very cool. Achieving your goals means leaving other things behind.
8. Share Your Goals. We all need help once in awhile. We should rely on others to support us. In fact, I’d bet that many people share your goals. I’m seeing that with the Post-Thanksgiving Goal Writing Project. If we all have similar goals, it should be easy for us to share.
9. Make Goal Setting a Habit. Achieving goals can be much easier once goal setting becomes a habit. Set goals, work through them, achieve them. Rinse and repeat. It’s not as easy as chewing gum, but once goal setting is a habit the process itself proves much easier to accomplish. You’ll find yourself more inspired, more ready to achieve and eager to get things done.

I want to thank Jonathan George for his thoughts on Setting goals and getting what you want. I was inspired.

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Even if you’ve got a thousand projects on-the-go it’s not always easy to stay productive, although there’s never a shortage of things to do. Actually, it can be worse than having one thing to focus on completely.

Whether you’re multitasking or honed in on one uber-project, staying productive is often a challenge. It is for me.

So one of my post-Thanksgiving goals is to focus on staying productive throughout the entire day. I’m going to do this in a few ways, starting with keeping a better to-do list.

I’ve also got to:

• Really focus on priorities
• Avoid distractions
• Review my accomplishments daily
• Punch myself in the face if I don’t meet my daily goals

Everyone needs a break now and again, and I don’t plan on skipping lunch, setting up a bedpan near my desk and sleeping only 5 minutes per day. What I do plan on doing is really honing in one what I have to get done on a daily basis and getting that stuff done.

An extension of that rather high level goal is to wake up earlier in the morning and find a way to feel more refreshed. When I wake up an hour earlier than usual I can get a ton of stuff done before my son (and wife) are up. It can be a super-productive time for me if I feel refreshed enough.

This morning I woke up early but tossed and turned in bed instead of jumping out and getting to it. I finally got up and started doing some work. Shortly thereafter I realized that I had sent a couple of emails but either couldn’t remember their contents or knew that I had misspoken in them. Oops. Working when you still can’t open your eyes isn’t a good move.

So, I need to find a way to be able to wake up early, on a consistent basis, and feel like I had a good night’s sleep.

Short of injecting caffeine into my bloodstream in the morning, anyone have any suggestions?

I know I can focus on staying more productive during the day. What I need much more help with is the second part of my goal - getting up, feeling refreshed. Maybe I need to get to sleep earlier. Maybe I need to exercise more (OK, maybe I need to START exercising), maybe I’m not eating well enough. I’m open to ideas!

This is part of my Post-Thanksgiving Goal Writing Project. You can participate too!

Write a post on your blog about your goals from now until Christmas. Link back here and tag your post “post-thanksgiving group writing project”. I’ll link to your site (at least twice) and encourage others to check out your goals!

Rolling along with some heftier goals I’m aiming to start two new businesses before 2006 is over.

Truth be told both businesses are in their planning stages, with some initial groundwork in place, so maybe I’m cheating a bit with this goal…Still, there’s no guarantee either business will launch by Christmas, or ever for that matter. One might not make it past the planning stages, or both might be sunk in the near future. That’s the nature of starting businesses: we do the research, thinking, planning, brainstorming, more planning and then decide whether it’s a go or no-go.

I’m hoping they’ll both be quite active by the holidays though, and that’ll be very exciting. One’s a bit closer to launch and smaller in scale, so expect some form of announcement soon (or maybe in early 2007!)

In my efforts to get these two new businesses off the ground, I’m trying to follow my own advice. Not because my advice / ideas on entrepreneurship are the uber-master words of an ultra-ninja expert, but because I really do want to eat my own dog food (as much as I think that expression is stupid.)

To-date I’ve:

• Put loyalty on the table
• Started crafting benefit statements and bringing on early clients
• Avoided spending a lot of money
• Kept an eye on the competition but haven’t obsessed over what they’re doing

There’s more to starting a business than that, but those are some of the things I’m working on while I focus on my goal of starting 2 new businesses before 2007.

Share your goals with me and others! Join the Post-Thanksgiving Group Writing Project!

Write a blog post (or more!) about your goals for the rest of the year and link back to Instigator Blog. Tag your posts (for Technorati), “post-thanksgiving goal writing project” and I’ll make sure to link back to you and try to connect you with others that can help you achieve your goals!