Life on Purpose

You’ve set up the goals to realise your vision so now, to achieve each goal you need a plan of action and schedule of the activities you need to take to achieve the results you seek. There are also some ‘general activities’ or non-vision related matters you’ll need to attend to so the plan must be realistic and the actions you set yourself must be do-able and leave room for all that ‘other stuff’. We’ll look at how you can achieve that in the next couple of steps but for now just consider the actions you need to take for each of the goals you’ve set yourself.

First of all, write down a list of the goals. You can do that on paper or on a spreadsheet, and then write down the actions which immediately spring to mind for each goal. You may find some activities apply to or contribute to more than one goal but most goals will have a set of unique activities.

Next for each goal get the activities you need to take into order. What do you do first, what next and so on? A word about these activities – they don’t need to be too ‘big’. If for example your goal is to write and publish a book then ‘write the book’ is not an activity, it’s multiple activities. Break it down into chapters and then into sections illustrating each point you want to make. My mentor Peter Thomson (who has written a book on how to write a book which you’ll find in the Resources section) advises for each chapter there might be ten topics or themes depending on the type of book you’re writing. One action might be to write one of these topics.

When creating this webspace I identified 274 activities under the heading of creating copy and then a similar number to type the sections into o the computer and do a ‘first edit’ – over 500 activities. Whilst doing these actions, one of which I’m carrying out right now, I’ve identified (so far) another 18 activities which may break down further.

Each activity takes me not more than 90 minutes, often less, so they are easily achievable and won’t disrupt my life in general. Setting short easily achievable activities has another effect. It gives you a great feeling of achievement at the end of the day and the knowledge you are ‘getting the job done’ and moving towards you goal, whereas if your actions are going to take a week you get the feeling by Wednesday, you’re getting nowhere fast.

Small, short actions are less prone to procrastination. You and I are more likely to ‘put off’ something that’s going to take a ‘whole day’ until we can find a ‘clear day’ to do it, but we can ‘fit in’ short actions between other things we are doing. You’ll get on much better with 1000 activities to reach your goal than 10.

If you’re in a situation where you need to make calls or post messages the action is not ‘make 100 calls’ but make 1 call x 100, one action for each call. It makes the set of actions far easier to fit in your day and what’s more it allows for interruptions or other unexpected ‘matters arising’.

Monitor what you are doing day by day in terms of the entirety of what needs to be done to complete your plans for each goal. You may find from time to time you need to speed up or ‘switch paths’ in your overall plan which is much easier if your activities are small than if they are large. There may be times when you have a number of undertakings which have to be done together or immediately after one another. If you have planned properly, you will be able to make arrangements for this to happen.

Planning is a lot ‘harder’ than goal setting – you really have to think and if you need help or advice don’t hesitate to book a call with me  or arrange a coaching session. Your plan is vital to the achievement of your goals whatever they may be. Fail to plan = plan to fail.