Best tips for Goal Setting and Tracking

By Mark Deering | 11/18/2020 |

It’s that time of year again for our team! We are busy creating our business plans and goals for the next year. We always take time in October and November to work on setting ourselves up for success in the new year. Whether you’re a pro at goal setting or you’re trying to be better at making goals, we want to share some helpful tips that we’ve found effective over the years. Here are 5 things that we have found help us crush our goals one step at a time.

Set a big idea for your year! Some people like to use a word for the year to set their goals around, like “Invest,” “Grow,” “Opportunity,” etc. This can be helpful in figuring out what goals you want to make or creating an overall vision for your year.
Create a Vision Poster! We do these every year on our team. We collect pictures that show visually our goals and what we want the year to look like. These pictures are a combination personal and stock images that we put into a collage poster from Shutterfly and then print them off and hang them up in our offices. Our posters are usually a combo of personal goals and work goals. Sometimes they include pictures from places we want to go in the year, work accomplishments we want to achieve, events we want to do, people we want to develop relationships with, etc. Our posters also have a common motivational phrase.
Make sure your goals are SMART! Maybe you’ve heard this acronym before, but it’s still good to remember. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. So say you want to lose weight next year (a common goal for many people.) Instead of just the generic, “I want to lose weight or become healthy.” You would say, “I want to lose 20lbs.” This is specific, measurable, and attainable. It is also relevant if your long term objectives are to live longer, reduce some medical problems or potential problems, or to increase confidence in yourself. You also need to make it Time-based. Make sure it is not too long of a time so that you don’t forget about it or become lax in working toward it. In the case of losing 20lbs, you might put a desired time, of say, 4 months. This is still attainable and gives you a time frame that isn’t unreasonable, but that still puts the pressure on for motivation.
Make your goals into bite-sized pieces. Don’t just set a large goal and then leave it. This can become too overwhelming and can then feel unachievable. Goals are best completed in small steps. Set the big deadline, then break it down into, quarters, months, weeks, and days. One of our favorite tools for helping to break down goals and make tasks lists is Trello! We’ve been using Trello for years to create a collaborative workspace for tasks and goals. See our video below for how to use this awesome FREE tool!