Chapter 3: Setting Long And Short Term Goals
Goals and objectives are particularly important when you are making a living online because, without goals and often with no-one else to guide you or push you in the right direction, it is extremely easy to find yourself adrift and aimless.
The easiest way to highlight this is to view your daily business activities as designed to take you on a journey to a place where you want to be, but that place has to be a specific somewhere – it cannot just be anywhere.
It’s like driving off in your car with absolutely no idea of where you are headed!
If you don’t know where you are going, why are you leaving at all?
Goals and objectives are what will keep you motivated and focused – both essential to being productive.
What do goals have to do with time management?
Once you know where you want your life to be in one year, or in ten years, then it should have an impact on everything that you do today and every day.
With a long term goal in place, you can create a series of short term goals which are the ‘stepping stones’ that you need to pass, in order to get to the ultimate objective that you have established for yourself.
Not only does this idea of short term objectives leading to long term goals make practical sense (i.e.: getting accepted to University is a shorter term goal than becoming a partner in a law firm) it also helps you from becoming overwhelmed or losing sight of why you do what you do every day.
By beginning to actively manage your time, you accept that there is a limited supply available to every one of us and that, because of the scarcity involved, it is incredibly valuable.
While the responsibilities of making sure that everything you do online makes enough money naturally dictates how you plan your day, you should never lose sight of the ‘big picture’’ that is, the achievement of your ultimate goals.
When you start planning your time with a long term goal in mind, it is easier to appreciate the benefits of what you are doing on a daily basis.
This helps prevent you from getting caught up in time wasters – activities that use up your time but are ultimately unprofitable either in monetary terms or in your personal life.
Setting sensible goals and objectives
If you are currently struggling to reach your first $100 in your internet marketing efforts, then you cannot realistically expect to make $1m this year!
Take it one step at a time.
Once you hit the first $100, you should then aim for $500.
Achieve that and then aim for $2,000, then $5,000 and so on.
Take it one step at a time, but don’t aim for purely linear growth.
That is, from $100 do not aim for $200, then $300, and so on.
Aim to grow exponentially, that is from $100 go to $500 (a jump of $400) then $2,000 (the jump now is $1,500) and so on. Achieve a bigger improvement every time, and pretty soon your $1m target should become a reality!
At the same time, realize that there is more to life than work.
Take some time to figure out exactly what you’d like to be doing with your life as an integral part of your long term objective setting scenario.
For example, you might find that your work time is eating into the time you want to spend with your family.
Identifying your goals in both your working and social life will help you make decisions to make better use of your time.
Creating your long term goals
Long term goals don’t necessarily have to be boringly realistic, but what does need to be realistic is the plan for your journey that is your attempt to get there.
If you want to have an online business that makes $10 million a year in five years time, great, as long as you have a reasonable plan as to how you might get to that point.
Long term goals help you see beyond today’s often mundane work and remind you that there is a greater purpose for the time you are spending. Every time you find a task troublesome, long term objectives will allow you to think about how doing the work benefits you in the long term.
This long term planning should help you to turn your daily tasks into choices, and this can ease some of the burden that comes along with boring work.
On the other hand, if you realize that many of the time consuming activities that you do actually have no bearing on reaching your goals, then you have to do everything you can to reduce the time you spend on them.
For example, returning to our earlier point about minimizing the time spent on the jobs that you do because you are the only one who can do them.
We have already established that you should be using time saving tools like the Statsdash software highlighted earlier.
This will save hours of your time over the course of a normal working week, time that you can then use to actually earn money (rather than wasting it).
Statsdash will simply allow you to reclaim a chunk of your time that you would otherwise be wasted, pure and simple.
Your long term goal may be to spend more time with your family.
Why not take the ‘bonus’ free time given back to you by Statsdash and do exactly that with it – spend it with your family?
A logical step towards spending more time with your family would be to plan to spend less time glued to the keyboard.
Think of it like working part time, instead of full time
Think about it in these terms, and then make a concrete, long term plan as to when it will happen. Write down the date this will take effect and put it on your calendar.
It may be that these goals will take two years to achieve, but the important thing is to pick a very specific date. Perhaps put it where you can see it every day, so you are constantly reminded of where you are going!
Setting short term goals
It should now follow that your short terms goals will really be an intrinsic part of the long term goals that you have set for yourself.
For example, continuing with the idea of working less and being with your family more, you should have a plan that is set out step by step.
Especially if you can make more money whilst working less, cutting down on effort whilst boosting your income.
Working smarter, not harder, in other words!
But transitioning from the theoretical to the practical might not be so straightforward, and, often times, it can be easy to get too ‘tied up’ in what you are doing right now.
You might have certain projects that you want to complete before you can even take a small step in the right direction.
For example, let’s say that your particular internet niche is software creation and that you are in the process of building a complete suite of software programs that are all interdependent on one another. Thus, it is not a job that you can leave half completed.
Perhaps you might promise yourself that once the whole suite is completed, you will begin to cut down your hours.
You might decide to become far more selective about what new software assignments you can handle or decide to take on an assistant so you can focus on the main business and get help in handling the more minor tasks.
Such short term goals will help you measure your progress towards your long term goal.
They will shape how you plan your time and clarify the VALUE of your time.
Make your goals specific and give them a date to be completed.
5 simple steps to having achievable objectives.
Although many of the points highlighted in this report are specific to those earning a living online, the 5 P’s of goal setting apply to each and every one of us.
Prioritize: You may have many goals. Prioritize them on your list.
Positive: Be precise. “I will have supper with my family three nights a week” rather than “I will be home earlier”
Performance: Measure your performance. Set time for starting and completing your goal. “May 1 – I will not work past 8pm any night this week”
Practical: Make sure that your goals are practical. Do you have the control to make this work or do you rely on other people to meet your goal?
Personal: Is this goal a personal goal or something someone else wants you to achieve?
Good time management is considerably easier when you can motivate yourself and thus judge the true value of your time. The 5 P’s are designed to make sure that you stay suitably motivated at all times, thus making the task of achieving your goals easier too.
The importance of having an action plan
Now that you have all your goals and objectives clearly established, it is time to work out how you will achieve them. This is where having a clear action plan comes into play.
When you run an online business, the basis of any action plan is more than likely to be very simple.
I’d guess it would be, ‘Make the business more profitable!’
Everything that you do should be aimed at achieving this, and thus, your short term goals will be tied in very closely with the overall plan.
Now that you have made yourself conscious of where you are headed (long term goal) and have set up your ‘step-by-step’ guide posts (short term goals) it will merely mean implementing an action plan to get your time on track.
Use your short term goals to implement your action plan.
If you are not making radical changes but are just trying to take the stress out of your day you will find the time you took to think about your goals may be enough to keep your priorities in order.
If you find that you need to refocus on your goals you will need to give each short term goal a date to start or complete – write it down.
The action plan combined with a focused long and short term goals will help you appreciate the overall effects of valuing your time.
Use the available tools and resources!
Part of your action plan should include a summary of the resources you need to meet your goals.
An assistant is a resource, more education is a resource, and a supportive friend or family member is a resource.
List the resources you need to obtain and include them in your action plan – when will you get them and how will they be obtained?
In fact, working online has one huge ‘bonus’ to offer in terms of resources.
That is, whatever job it is that you are doing, there is almost always a ‘tool’ – software, guide books or even instructional videos and audios – that will help you get it done more quickly or efficiently.
We have already highlighted just how much time you can save every day by using one such resource, Statsdash to log on to you important accounts.
But, in almost every area of your business, it is possible to save additional time by using software and technology to ‘cut corners’ and to automate simple, every day tasks.
For example, many people who are operating their own online business have disorganized computers.
Files are routinely lost, placed in the wrong folders and so on.
Finding them is a clear cut timewaster, so make an effort to get organized now!
These great free tools will help you do so:
http://www.claybutler.com/cb_desktop_organizer.html
http://www.sticky-notes.net/
http://www.msdsoft.com/eng/index.htm
http://www.kalendra.com/
How many different sites do you log into every day that requires a password?
Do you input these passwords manually? If so, you are wasting time again.
Try these programs to remember your passwords automatically.
http://www.roboform.com/
http://www.kristanixsoftware.com/passwordmanagerdeluxe/
There are even complete web-based time management programs available online, such as the excellent Timejar which offers a free 30 day trial:
http://timejar.com/
If you are using either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox as your browser, then there is a Google search bar available for both that will considerably speed up your search capabilities.
Just run a search for ‘free Google toolbar’ and you’ll find it.
If you download a lot of file or folders, then you should consider using a download manager (or download accelerator, as they are sometimes called) as a way of speeding the process up.
For example, if Firefox is your favorite browser, then you will find that a combination of ‘Flash Got’ and ‘Flash Get’ (both are free downloads) will speed up your downloading capacity immensely, especially if you have a slower internet connection.
Again, just run a search for ‘download manager’ in Google or Yahoo and you’ll find a whole heap of free programs that will do this for you.
Even good old Microsoft Outlook has some pretty good organizing tools, so there really is no excuse to be disorganized.
The bottom line is, almost every job that you do on the net can be automated to some extent.
If you are trying to build a mailing list, you must, absolutely must, use an autoresponder to assist you. The best one is called aweber:
http://www.aweber.com/
Even in specific ‘niches’ of internet marketing, there are tools available that will help you cut down dramatically on the time you waste on mundane, trivial tasks.
For example, if your business is based around article marketing, then you should take a look at the Deskpile suite of programs to see how they can help you automate many aspects of your business:
http://www.deskpile.com/
You want to submit your articles to the major directories? Then, you can either do it the ‘old-fashioned’ way, submitting by hand, or you can get a superb free submission software program that sends you article to 86 directories, from here:
http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com/
Then, of course, you should be looking for programs that will help you earn money with as little ‘hands on’ work as possible.
For example, we have already seen just how much time can be saved by using Statsdash to check your Clickbank, PayPal and AdSense accounts.
Now, all you need to do is sit back and watch these accounts increase every time you log into them, with as little effort as possible.
Review and update
Writing goals down is an effective tool for managing your time. But, you will still need to review and update them occasionally.
For example, it’s a given that nothing ever goes exactly the way that you plan.
New and unexpected information will always come along to alters your planning.
Use this new information to reassess your objectives.
Are they still attainable ‘as is’, or do you need to adjust them – either by lengthening the time or changing the outcome – and devising a new action plan?
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