You are more likey to succeed and work effectively if you set a goal. Just by setting your goal, writing it down, weird things happen that come into play and make you more likely to achieve it.

Right at the very start of a new project, you have to define a goal for yourself and the project. Where do you want the project to be in 6, 12 or 18 months time?

You need to be able to look ahead and create that vision. In this blog post we talk about the benefits of setting a goal for your project. As usual we use a reuse project as an example but it could be anything. 

At the end you can download our super simple guide " How to set goals" which will help your in your work and home life.

This 7 step guide to setting goals really helped me and it will help you achieve. 

Reasons to set a goal

1) Get buy in from your collaborators!

It is important to be able to communicate that goal. It’s not just you and your project that you have to consider on this journey, it’s the team of collaborators you have beside you that will provide you with support in the good times and the bad. You need this informal team, and they need  to see and understand your goal.

2)  Helps you develop a plan to get there

Every great leader pictures the end result and then figures out the backwards steps from there. This allows them to break down the process, and reduce the incidence of going off on tangents or do activities that do not contribute towards the end goal.

Without breaking down the project it’s going to be overwhelming, not just for you, but for all the people you try to bring into your team too. When something overwhelms you, it’s hard to tackle it, halting progress and turning that project into a monster.

How do you do it? Set your vision. Set a goal, break it down into milestones. Those milestones are the main parts of the project. Break those milestones down into tasks, and break those down into subtasks. Everything you have there - that’s your process towards your goal.

3) Helps you avoid distractions

Setting a goal helps you avoid distractions because you always know what you should be doing and are less likely to get pulled in to email or social media distractions!

Daniel O'Connor Warp It Founder picks up here 

"You should be specific about the goal. You should say what it is you want to achieve or what it is you want to change. When you then break it down into milestones you always know what you should be doing to take you that one step forward. The thing is when you don't have milestones to break down and you don't know exactly what you're doing it means you can get distracted by anything. Some distractions are a waste of time, some are less of a priority than others but when you've got these milestones and you've got this plan, and this goal then at least you know what is a priority. The priority is you're going to move towards your goal so you always know what you should be doing."

Top tip: Set a time limit!

Set short time limits against each task. If you set deadlines way off in the future, the activity will never get done. This is something called Parkinson's Law; "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". If you don’t set short deadlines and stick to them distraction creeps in.

What happens when you don’t hit your goals?

“Last year our business was three or four years old, and it was around January when we thought, ‘I'm going to sit down and, for the next couple of weeks, We're going to sort out our goals for the next year.’ Okay, so we did that, we set some goals, a time frame, the delegation, and all that sort of thing. One of the goals was that we wanted to have ten new international customers in 100 days and I thought, ‘I'm going to set myself a really, really big and ambitious goal. I'm going to really focus on it’ and then my plan was, ‘I want to focus on that with no distractions,’ and you know what? I completely failed.”

“We got three international customers in that time, but that process, and what it actually taught me was, ‘it's not about achieving the goal, it's the process of developing goals and working towards them’. Just by setting that goal of ten international customers in 100 days I was more driven. You know, I got three, and I wouldn't have got those three without setting that goal. I learned that yes, I set too big a goal, but it helped me get my processes and procedures in place for building rapport, and approaching international customers. The point is not always to achieve the goal, but to take in valuable lessons whilst trying to achieve the goal!”

Download our "How to set Goals" super simple guide below. This is one of our most popular downloads. 

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Let us know how you get on!