3 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Goal Setting

After working through Week 1: Setting Goals, in Ariel Hyatt’s Music Success In 9 Weeks, I’ve decided that I need to improve my goal setting skills. I want to support myself better (avoid sabotage!), and be able to experience the satisfaction of accomplishing things daily, monthly, and yearly. Here follow some observations around goal setting.

3 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Goal Setting

1. Clear your Mental Energy and Psychic Space

Suzanne Evans, in her Business Blueprint program, lists 5 common things that can be significant time drains:

– a bad relationship or marriage

– an unresolved issue that you think about daily

– a secret that you are afraid will be found out

– an unresolved major money issue

– a lie

It’s essential to look at these things before doing anything else, because when we’re psychically weighed down, we’re less efficient. Example: last week, I finally took my Canadian Citizenship Test. I could have applied about 10 years ago! I can really feel how my psychic space has opened up.

2. Use a Task Management Program

I’m a big advocate for writing things in pen, on paper, and I use black Mead 5 Star Notebooks http://bit.ly/woK60W for scribbling down all my lyrics and stuff like goals and to-do lists. After I fill an entire notebook, I go through and list all the songs I wrote in it (lyrics scattered and disorganized throughout) on a kind of Table Of Contents 3×5 card. But I find it’s also necessary to make entries in the computer for easy tracking and archiving.

For getting organized, I like Things, http://culturedcode.com/things/, because I believe “out of your head, out of your way” is another step towards clearing mental energy and psychic space. You can track your 5 Successes Each Day, as Ariel Hyatt  suggests, with a To-Do list, as well as set up the Bigger Picture. Create Projects, and break them down into manageable tasks with due dates. Define different areas of responsibility, such as creative, business, and personal. My downfall has always been the attaching-dates-and-sticking-to-them deal, so I want to use Things more wisely.

3. Become A Better Task Manager

David Allen is the man behind something called the Getting Things Done System. There is a cool quiz here http://www.gtdiq.com/, where “In less than two minutes, you will get a visual representation of where you fit in terms of the two critical elements of self management – control and perspective.”

You can see right away how your personal productivity ranks. Then you can follow him on Twitter, sign up for his newsletter, download free articles, etc., and go about becoming a ‘Captain And Commander’ in the world of Getting Things Done.

That’s what I intend to do.