You set goals, right? Some people can get by willy nilly, going from task to task while accomplishing plenty. But most of us need some sort of written vision — something to guide us as we amble through the chaos that is life. The turn of a new year provides an excellent occasion to create new goals. And so every year many of us, if not most of us, write down our New Year’s Resolutions. But, as you likely know first hand, most New Year’s Resolutions fail. And so we’re again left without clear goals, and therefore without a clear path to follow.
While goals fail for many reasons, a big one is that we simply don’t check on them. We create them in January, and that’s it. By April many of us have forgotten about our goals. Yet it’s at just that time, a quarter of the way through the year, that we should review our goals. Doing so will allow us to adjust for current conditions and refocus our efforts. It might be the most important aspect of sticking with our goals.
Even if you don’t write down specific goals, but rather keep a general vision in your head, now is a great time to reevaluate. Is the vision still vivid? Does it still inform your decisions and actions? If not, it might need some readjusting. Taking the time to think out your long-term vision can only help.
It’s funny, in a tragic way, how silly it is to lose track of our goals, or sight of our vision. Think about all the time we waste every day. Think of all that idle downtime where we fill our heads with fantasies of a life that doesn’t exist. Why not take just 10 minutes of that downtime — and I’m willing to bet you have an hour or more per day, whether you realize it or not — and refocus your efforts? If you did that once a quarter, you’d be in good shape. Once a month? How about once a week? It’s just 10 minutes, versus hundreds of wasted minutes.