My 3 step goal setting, tracking & achieving process!
I hope you’re down for a bit more behind-the-business info, cause today I’m sharing exactly how I set goals, track my progress towards them and then finally achieve them in my online business!
If you find yourself setting goals and then legitimately forgetting about them until a year later (I was previously guilty as charged on this one for sure,) then this should come in super handy for you in your business too.
I used to set goals (“because that’s what successful business owners do right?”) and then proceeded to never checked in on them, and as could be expected, made absolutely no progress towards them. Whooops!
I’ve now since gotten my act together, and set goals not because you’re ‘supposed to’ but because I actually have stuff I want to get done in my life & business. I also have a set schedule by which I check in on my goals and therefore, I tend to actually achieve them.
So, here’s my goal setting, tracking & achieving process!
Feel free to implement it in your business too. (And you can thank me later when you start knocking off goals left and right like the efficiency machine I know you can be!)
Step 1. Set goals
Duh.
Okay, so first things first. You need to decide what’s actually important to you and your business. What are the things you really need to do to move the needle to get your life and business to where you dream they would be?
Maybe you’ve got those goals super crystal clear in your mind. If that’s the case, write ‘em down!
If you’re really not so sure on exactly what your goals are, instead of just setting goals that you don’t really care about just for goal-setting sake, really reflect back on what you’ve done in the past to help you decide what you really need to get done in the future.
In this post I give ya a few prompts of questions to ask yourself in order to really plan out what you want the next year of your business and life to look like. Again, write ‘em down!
In your business, you definitely want to set a financial goal per quarter and a marketing success tracking goal per quarter. For me, my marketing strategy of choice is my email list, so I set a goal for the size of my email list every quarter. And of course I set a financial goal too.
Step 2. Put your goals where you will see them
For me, I use Asana as my project management system. Every day I sit down to work, I open up my Asana which gives me my marching orders for the day.
If you’re a paper planner type girl, or a Trello fan or a straight up regular calendar person, then put your goals in there. Basically, put your goals in the thing which gives you your tasks for the day.
(I had previously kept my goals in a Google doc, which I created on Jan. 1st and didn’t look at again until Dec. 31st. And guess how many goals got achieved when I put them somewhere out-of-sight-out-of-mind? If you guessed just about none, you my friend are one smart cookie!)
I want you to put your goals in two places in your calendar/Asana/planner.
First, put your goal into the day/week you plan to complete it, so obv, you actually remember to do the thing
Second, also put it on the last day of the quarter
Putting your goals not only on the dates you’re going to do them but also on the last day of the quarter means you have both the time to do them, and you’ll also be forced to check in with yourself and determine how well you did in achieving it at the end of the quarter.
I use the boards option in Asana to set my goals by quarter, like so:
Step 3. Check in at the end of each quarter & regroup
When the end of the quarter arrives, it’s time to take your hand away from your eyes and see how you actually did.
Let’s be real, you’ll kill some goals and blow right past what you expected and then for others you’ll come up hellah-short. There are some things you might skip because you determine they’re just not as important as you expected. There’s others you know are really vital but just never got around to.
It’s now up to you to either check them off saying you completed them, or check them off because you plan to not do them, or set a new date in the next quarter when you’d like to accomplish them.
So again, set those goals in your next quarter both when you plan to do them and when you need to check in on them at the end of the quarter.
There you have it, a pretty simple but effective process, don’t you agree?! Best of lucking killing those goals girl!
