Prioritize Your Goals So You Can Actually Achieve Them
“If everything is important, nothing is important”
Prioritizing is one of the hardest facets of adulting because we all have a million things on our plate at any given time, and the sheer weight of that can be overwhelming. When you add the goals and dreams you have for your life, it starts to feel impossible.
How can you prioritize if everything is a priority? Where do you start if everything is urgent?
Having too much on your plate is likely to leave you feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, and if you're like me, utterly confused to the point where you do nothing at all and simply eat a cookie to calm your nerves. (This is real, by the way. I'm a stress eater and my comfort foods of choice are chocolate chip cookies and caramel ice cream...don't judge me).
Friends, let me hit you with the major headline...
You can only focus on one thing at a time
It's great to have lofty goals and to feel the urgency to achieve them all simultaneously. By all means, reach for the tippy top of that mountain, but recognize that the only way to climb that bad boy is one step at a time. If you could blink your eyes and cross your arms, I-Dream-Of-Jeanie-style, then you would be there already, wouldn't you?
When you are trying to do too many things at once, you end up being busy just for busyness's sake, leaving you mostly empty-handed and exhausted. As hard as it is, you have to focus, pick a few projects/goals that you want to work on and buckle down to make them as successful as possible.
Let me tell y'all, this is a hard personal lesson for me. I'm a lifelong dreamer and job-hopper. I'm 31 years old and have had approximately 13 job titles with about 20 different companies, and I had zero intention of changing my ways.
"Life is too short to just do one thing," I'd say. While I still believe that, I've had to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to my entrepreneurial pursuits, the only way to take a dream from idea to reality is to work on it consistently. As a woman who has a list of responsibilities with precisely 99,346 items on it, this means that my consistency has to be coupled with focus. There simply aren't enough hours in the day or days in the year for me to work on every one of my dreams AND accomplish every other very important thing I have to do (like keep my tiny humans alive, for example).
How to prioritize your goals
Personally, I've never been able to focus on just one thing. I thrive in an environment where I have multiple projects going at the same time. It helps me to stay engaged, and it keeps me from being utterly heartbroken if one of the things I'm pouring my heart into doesn't work out.
This is a good place for me to pause and tell y'all that I have read many, many books on prioritization, efficiency, and goal-setting, so what I'm sharing with you is what I have taken away from the experiences of others and adapted to suit my personality and lifestyle. If you need a book recommendation, I got you. If you want a quick, mini-lesson on prioritizing and working towards your goals, grab a pen and jot these steps down:
1) Make a list of all your goals and dreams - write down every single thing you can think of, from reading a new book and learning to sew to taking your dream vacation and writing a best-seller. Don't overthink this part, just write.
2) Categorize them - There are three major categories that your goals will fall into:
Personal
Professional
Relationships
Put each of your dreams into the category that best fits. If you wrote them all on one sheet of paper, pick three different-colored highlighters to mark them with. Now, if the idea of having multiple colors on one page stresses you out, you could also get a whole new sheet of paper and make three mini-lists.
3) Pick one goal/dream from each category (This is the toughest part for me) - These are the three goals you will spend your time and energy on right now. Understand that you don't have to pick just one from each category. You could have two professional goals and one personal goal, or two relationship goals and one personal goal...just try not to have all three goals in one category because you need to have some balance.
4) Make appointments in your schedule to work on each of these - Now that you've narrowed down your goals, you have to make time to actually work on them. Remember that our mission here is to take your dreams from idea to reality, and unless you add these things to your schedule, you'll probably never move on from the "idea" phase. Personally, I assign certain days for projects, and schedule dates for goals that need attention daily. For example, my current goals involve growing the audience of this blog, and spending quality time with my kids. So each week, I pick a day when I’ll dedicate most of my work time to creating content or editing posts, and I’ll pick a cut-off time to dedicate to my kids, like cooking dinner together or walking to the park, everyday.
There is one more step, but it's so important that it deserves its own heading:
Review your goals every few months
Many of the books I've read and experts I've listened to have said that your goals shouldn't have a time limit because true tenacity means that you never give up. It's admirable to be so passionate and so dedicated to something that you literally don't stop until you make it a reality, but that simply doesn't work for me. If I'm going to put all of my energy into something, I need to see that it's making progress or I need to do something different. Besides, the time limits that I'm talking about are to revisit your goals, see how things are going and if you've made any progress, and re-evaluate your approach, if needed.
For the most part, I revisit my goals 2-3 times a year, which means I stick to whatever I’m doing for 4-6 months and then evaluate my progress (or lack thereof in many cases).
Whew! I know that was a lot, but I truly believe in these ideas. I practice what I preach and I share it with y'all in hopes that you will find it useful.
Do you think this will work for you? Are you willing to try it? Tell me your thoughts! Connect with me on:
