blueprint

In the past few years, we have all seen a surge in how achieving your goals and getting the life you want has been the hype across Social Media. Especially during New Year Times, so-called life coaches and self-help gurus echo how your actions and determination is the key to your life’s success and also to your life’s problems. However, what they all fail in, is teaching us how can we be better at achieving what we want in life. So many of us set goals but fail to complete them. We lose interest, get busy with life, get overwhelmed, don’t know where to begin, procrastinate and so on. After years of repeating such mistakes, I finally became better at setting and achieving my goals. And now, I want to share tips and tricks from my experience to help others.

1. Goals have deadlines

   Something is not a goal if it does not have a definite deadline. Else it turns into a wish list that you will never get serious about. Deadlines gives us urgency. Don’t say something like “I want to lose weight this year.” (Strange how a lot of people have this on their list.) Say “I want to lose weight in the next 3 months.”

2. Not every goal is important

   Learn how to prioritize your goals. This will help you define which goals are more important than others. Learn where to focus your efforts and resources. We may have things like “Completing a thesis”, “Creating a new diet”, “Getting a job”, “Learning how to cook”, etc. Surely, your education and career need to be a top priority, followed by you health and then your hobby.

3. Goals are measurable

   Unless you can measure where you are in terms of progress and achievement, your goal will never end and it will exhaust you. Hence, goals need to be quantifiable so you can measure their progress. Let’s come back to our goal of losing weight. You will not make any progress if you can not measure how much you lost in a month and see how near you are your destination. Or say the one about writing a thesis where you can measure your progress on how far you have come along in creating a draft, collecting data, and so on.

4. Goals are specific

   Avoid setting goals that are vague or not clear. Your goal needs to be as detailed as possible so that you know where to begin and where to end. Being specific about something helps us avoid getting lost. Again, back to our goal about losing weight. When people say they want to lose weight, they make it by vague. They forget the most important question, by how much and by when. This can get even more detailed, say which part of the body? Arms? Stomach? Lower Back? How? Joining a gym? Improving your diet? More Exercise? You see where I am going with this.

5. A Goal can be broken down

   A goal can be broken down into manageable pieces, called action plans. Action plans are simple tasks that you can achieve to accomplish a big plan. Think of them as checkpoints. Let’s give our “Losing Weight” goal a break. Say you want to get a job. A general step by step progress would be first create or improve your resume, second write a general cover letter, third search and apply to 2-3 jobs per day and so on. Or It can also be in random. Say for increasing your connections/friends, it would be find a hobby, improve social media, get on dating sites, join a gym, go hiking or trekking, find a nice cafe to get coffee twice a week, and so on.

6. Goals must be realistic

   I know what you’re thinking. “Well of course. It can’t be something unrealistic.” But see, this is a bit more complex. Let me give a couple of examples: “Buy a house next year.” when you are barely scrapping by or have no savings or investment. “Marry next year” when you do not even have a relationship currently. See where I am going with this. This type of goal is called Pipe Goals. Something that might take you 5 years but you expect it to happen in just 1. Hence, learn how to balance your expectations with your current situation and capabilities.

These are the key rules I follow every time I am setting a new goal for my life. And keeping these guidelines in mind, I designed and created an progressive web application called blueprint. The design is simple and the app’s functionality are based on these same principles. Feel free to use it for your life progress as well.