Goal setting and timelines

I hope you managed to get something of interest and value from yesterday's post. I know it was long, and I know it meant you actually had to do something in order to gain the true benefit from reading it, but I hope the length didn't put you off either reading or applying the new information.

Have you noticed that there are some goals we can achieve far more easily than others? One of the reasons why has to do with the timing of the item. Take Christmas as a very good example. As you know I live in Australia. Most of my extended family lives in my home country of England, which means I have until the end of the first week of December to get the presents / parcels and cards I want to send "home" organised and into the mailbox. And by the first week of September if I want to send it by sea mail (yes there is still such a thing). Of course I could use any of the online stores to do my shopping and sending for me, but I prefer to buy gifts you can't get elsewhere - as in I send them Aussie bits and pieces. So I have to be organised. I have my goal and I break down the goal into easily achievable (lunch time) tasks - which occur over many days and weeks in the lead up to the deadline.

What happens if the deadline you set is an arbitrary point in the future - it has no real consequence if you don't achieve something by a certain day. Well in my experience, those deadlines are the ones we conveniently forget about. We put back the tasks we know we need to do eventually and sooner or later we jerk ourselves into awake and remember that somewhere in the dim and distant past of our minds we had promised ourselves we had to do something.

Are your goals like that?

Then it is time to get serious about your thought processes and your timelines. Ask yourself one very simple question - what would happen if you NEVER achieved that goal? And a follow up. What would you do if once you said you didn't want to achieve something - that option was forever wiped off your memory's white board. Like time iteself, once spent you cannot go back and say - wait a minute I was going to do so and so - come back there was a half hour I didn't use yesterday. How would you feel about that goal then?

I know that's not really going to happen in most cases - but remember we are all working towards the day when our own personal "dead line" meets us, and we won't be able to do anything anymore other than "sleep".... (and yes I know this will depend on your own particular belief system - but humur me just for a minute as we only have promises, and once on the other side, have no way of letting the folks back "home" know the truth).

So, once again I ask - if it were all to end today, would you be happy with what you have achieved?