Traditionally I’ve been rather bad at setting up long term goals for this blog. So this year I thought I would try to do things a bit different. I would create a plan.
This post is for you if you’re bad at creating plans and goals or simply want a little inspiration on structuring and following up on your business goals.
The small framework that I present in this post is something I’ve used to categorize and prioritize my own goals for this year. The goal of the framework is to cover different aspects og goal setting around your business, while mainly focusing on recurring actions that needs to be taken over time such continues marketing or blogging efforts.
Last in the post I will also share a free tool that I’m using to follow up on my own goals.
But first let me briefly discuss why I think it’s important that you track and follow up on your goals.
Following up on your goals
What you don’t measure/track doesn’t get done. It’s that simple.
That’s why that if you wanted to lose weight, the first two things you should do would be to a) get a scale for weighing yourself and b) create a simple spreadsheet where you could track your daily weight.
By consistently adding a focus to your goal but also being able to see how even small results tie into the overall goal, is a route to success much more relevant than a specific raw food recipes in the case of weight loss.
Don’t know how we suddenly got into weight loss
By wanting to track your results, you also make sure that create goals that are actually measurable. It is hard to track a goal stating “I want to be a better father“, but I could create a goal saying “Number of times I took my daughter to the cinema“.
By only stating I want to become a better father, I might express a wish, but it’s hardly something that will change my behaviour unless I follow it up with an action.
Creating the right kind of goals
Now if you’ve ever worked with setting goals before chances are that you’ve heard about “
Your goals should really live up to the following criteria:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
As you can see I focus mainly on making it measurable. While making smart goals are great, I don’t want to bog you down with too much theory. Just focus on the two first criteria and make them specific and measurable. It’s also a good idea to have a deadline on the goal (that’s the “time-bound”) for now I’m assuming that this is something that you will be working on over a longer period (since we’re focused on business goals here).
So the goals we’re working with here are those that has actions reoccurring over time, since they are part of running and growing your business.
We are not focused on one-off goals like “create a website”. This is typically more about breaking down the project in small tasks and then executing them.
We want some very feasible recurring goals like “Write X of words on my new book in Y period“.
But notice that the X and Y may change.
Since it’s easy to create a really ambitious goal and say that you want 50000 words written in two weeks (while this is certainly doable, it’s probably not something that I or most people will ever do), but it’s also easy to feel it as a failure if you don’t succeed in this.
Getting into the habit
So in the example of writing on your new book, you should rather focus on getting you into the habit of writing first. If you get a habit of writing each day, it’s easier to scale that up, rather than starting out by writing 5000 words per day for three days and then quitting.
Therefore your first goal could be “Number of words written today“. And then add a monthly goal of 5000 words in your first month but gradually incrementing the goal to 20000 words per month (or even tracking this per week).
If you can introduce the activity leading to goal completion as a habit, there is a higher chance that you will reach your goal.
Therefore focus on getting the habit before you focus on completing the goal itself.
Or using other words…
So let’s look at the Framework
Now framework sounds like a big thing, polished chrome and everything, but it’s more about how you find and structure your goals to keep focus on the most important aspects in your business.
Step 1
First up I want you to write the following goal categories on a piece of paper:
- Business Development
- Marketing
- Selling
- Customer Support
Now the first three categories are very relevant to look at, the fourth one “Customer Support” is more dictated by your customers’ actions. So it’s a bit harder to proactive in this regard, but I’ve kept it there if you come up with any repeating actions that you could do.
Step 2
Next we can expand on each category by adding subcategories. Don’t worry, we’ll keep it in only two levels.
Your categories might look a bit different but I wanted to show a small part of how mine is structured (mainly the goals for this blog). Notice that while I don’t make any money on blog (I only got a few affiliate links here and there and certainly not enough to ever sustain me) I do regard it as “the business” in this example.
- Business Development
- Blogging own blog
- Guest blogging
- Marketing
- Social media
- Newsletter list
- Selling
- …
Step 3
Now we come to actually adding the goals to each subcategory.
For instance, I really want to be much more consistent with my blogging effort, so one of my goals is to “Write X words for my blog” per month (a number that will be increasing).
I actually also have a “Schedule X number of posts on my blog” per month. It might be unnecessary with the other goal, but it doesn’t need much tracking so for now it’s there as well.
Under social media I have goals like “Schedule X tweets” per month.
Notice that I use the word “schedule” instead of just “tweeting”.
Instead of doing a tweet here and a tweet there, I’m going to “batch” the creating of my tweets to optimize the time and effort I have to spend on it. So to begin with I might revisit this goal every week
Step 4
Turn it in to a spreadsheet where you can track your progress either daily or weekly whatever you feel like. I’m tracking daily but I’m also cheating and using a free tool that makes it easier to manage.
More on this last in the post…
Following up
Now that you’ve created your goals, it’s of course also important to actually follow-up on them.
I don’t have a messy desktop on my MacBook Pro, actually I only have a few links there, but the shortcut to my goals are right there so I can find it. I recommend that you do something similar. If you don’t see yourself clicking on that link at least once per day, you could go a step further and make the link open automatically each time you start or log on your computer. How to do this is however a bit out of scope for this post, but I’m sure you find the instructions to do this in no time.
Now when you begin your day you can quickly look down through the list of goals and decide what goals you will be working on that day.
Some might need you to do a little each day, but if you focus on batching you might choose to only focus on a given goal on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule.
Free tool for tracking your goals
And now the free tool I use myself and that I promised in the beginning of the post.
There are ton of different goal tracking tools out there, and even more if you count the task base “to-do” applications as well.
I needed something where I could track progress and preferable free. I actually signed up for 3 or 4 other online applications (nothing to download) before choosing this one.
It’s easy to use and the free plan is well…. free
Are you using any tools for tracking your goals?
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