You’ve Got Your Year-End Goals—What’s the Plan to Achieve Them?

by | Blog, Goals, Planning

3 Tips for Reaching Goals Before Year-End
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I know fall craziness is in full swing, but I hope you got the chance to read my latest blog. In it, I wrote about the concept of “important results” and what they might look like for you. I challenged you to get really clear about what your meaningful goals look like — specifically, your goals for the rest of this year.

So… have you done it?

Are you so clear about your goals for the rest of the year that you could rattle them off right now if someone asked you to?

Great! Now it’s time to make sure you’re clear about how you’re going to achieve those goals between now and the end of December. (Even if you’re not 100% clear about your goals for between now and year-end, keep reading!)

Accountability and Time Management

Accountability can be one important piece of your time management plan for the rest of the year.

From years of coaching clients through their time management and productivity challenges, I know what a powerful difference social support can make when you’re striving to achieve goals.

Take one study done by a psychology professor at Dominican University of California in 2015. Participants who ranged in age from 23 to 72 were broken into five groups.

  • Group 1 was asked to think about business-related goals they’d like to achieve over the next four weeks.
  • Group 2 was asked to write down those goals.
  • Group 3 was asked to write their goals, and write “action commitments” for how they’d reach those goals.
  • Group 4 was asked to write their goals and action commitments, and share their commitments with a friend.
  • Group 5 was asked to do everything Group 4 did, plus send a weekly progress report to a friend.

By the end of the study, just 43% of people in Group 1 had accomplished their goals or were at least halfway there—compared to 62% of Group 4 and 76% of Group 5.

While it’s just one small study, these results track for me. If you knew a trusted friend or colleague was waiting for a weekly progress report from you about a given project, wouldn’t that motivate you to make progress on it every week? Especially if that friend or colleague cheered you on and encouraged you to keep going after every weekly check-in?

Sometimes that extra little push from an outside source can make all the difference when you’re struggling to dig in and get something done. When you have two months to get your year-end goals achieved, every little extra push helps.

3 Tips for Reaching Goals Before Year-End

1. Create accountability for each of your goals.
There’s no one “right” way to do this! As I always say, we’re all wired differently. You might create accountability with yourself rather than turning to someone else. Maybe you’re a devoted journal-writer, and knowing that you’re going to write a weekly progress report in a journal entry is the most effective way to keep yourself motivated to keep going. Or maybe you know that you’re influenced by peer pressure, so you share your goals with your most organized friend and ask them to check in over the next two months to see whether you’re on track.

2. Check that your expectations are realistic.
The last few months of the year tend to be stressful enough. Putting pressure on yourself to not only achieve your goals, but complete them perfectly, is setting yourself up to fail. And end the year exhausted. Remember: perfect is the enemy of good. Focus on good enough, not over-the-top perfection.

3. Go to your calendar and actually map it all out.
Good intentions alone don’t solve your time management and productivity challenges. So it’s not enough to have clear goals, share them with others and really want to accomplish them before the end of the year. If you don’t literally schedule time to work toward those objectives, the next few months will fly by and all that time will get filled with other tasks. Get in front of your calendar for the next few months today to make sure you’re actually scheduling yourself enough time to get important things done.

And if you’re still not entirely clear about your goals?

Take a Moment to Focus

Back up a step and focus on that before you think about creating action around your goals. I’d urge you to create some time in your schedule ASAP to devote to this work. Maybe it’s a meeting that you schedule with a coworker to talk through year-end targets. Maybe it’s an hour that you clear on your schedule when you can head to a coffee shop and focus on clarifying your goals for the next two months. Or maybe it’s an hour that you spend with me—either one-on-one so we can talk next steps for you specifically, or at my upcoming webinar.

Join me on 10/20/22 at noon ET for 3 Keys to Achieving Your Most Important Results!
This no cost masterclass will last about an hour, and you’ll learn quick and actionable steps for making progress on the goals that matter to you most. Register to save your spot even if you can’t make it live so we can share the recording with you. Click here to save your spot.

You can also schedule a Strategy Session with me at any time. This is a no cost one-on-one session where we’ll clarify your next best move to creating the life you crave. Click here to request a Strategy Session.

I can’t wait to see what you can get done before New Year’s!

Gratefully,
Sarah

Sarah Reiff-Hekking
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