Maybe you want to run a marathon. Or maybe you want to become fluent in Spanish. What about starting that small business you’ve always dreamed of?
These are all fantastic, life-changing goals, no doubt — but there’s just one problem: How do you know what the first step towards achieving them is? What are you supposed to do today, like *right now* to get started towards accomplishing these intimidating, massive undertakings? More often times than not, these type of goals remain daydreams, and unfortunately are put back on the shelf for “another day.”
But there is one easy trick to build a snowball of momentum and overcome this procrastination: Break down your seemingly insurmountable tasks into bite-sized pieces.
Here’s a few ideas of how you could frame it: What’s the one thing you can do in the next hour to make progress towards launching that business? Do you have five minutes this morning to practice Duolingo? What about going for a long walk this afternoon before dinner? Easy!
Mini-Goals are the Secret Sauce to Success
It’s cheesy, but it’s true — momentum builds, but you often have to start small. Think about it: How daunting does “I want to write a book” sound? You know, just a casual 50,000 words. But take that intimidating goal and break it up into 365 — that's only 150 words per day, or about two paragraphs. So could you instead reframe your goal as “I want to write two paragraphs of my book each day”? I don't know about you, but that suddenly seems a heck of a lot more manageable, and honestly kind of a nice morning ritual to get into — you might even have it done before you’ve even finished your first cup of coffee.
Keep Track of Your Progress
There are bound to be days where you are lacking motivation, exhausted, discouraged or just straight-up disinterested in working towards your goals. First of all, you should acknowledge that this is completely normal, and maybe even consider take a rest day until you are back on track.
Then, once you are feeling up back on track, take a moment to pause and think back on where you were one week, one month or even one year ago. This is where it becomes super helpful to write all of your goals down. In fact, have you ever completed a task, realized it wasn’t written down on your to-do list, so you added it just so you could immediately cross it off? Guilty as charged. It might seem funny, but there’s a reason that we do this — the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing a task is a positive force that keeps us going onto the next one.
Celebrate Your Wins in Public
If you yourself accountable by sharing your mini-goals with friends and family ahead of time, you will be much more likely to follow-through with them. Share any small wins with coworkers, post on social media when you’ve reached a new milestone, throw a party when you’ve reached a major breakthrough — whatever you need to do to get the word out about your goals can help make all the difference.
Your ultimate end-goal still might feels a long way off, but as long as you don't let the train of momentum stop rolling completely, you'll get there eventually. Every small bit of effort compounds — and exponentially at that — as long as you don't stop.
Did you wake up at 6am to work out time times this week? Hell yeah, kudos to you! That’s absolutely something worth celebrating — idk, maybe treat yourself to an extra-large iced latte today? Even though one week of exercise won’t have resulted in achieving your long-term fitness goals quite yet, by celebrating and rewarding your accomplishment, you are that much more likely to show up and do it again next week.
Bite Sized Goals = More Realistic Goals
It’s no surprise that so many New Year’s Resolutions fail quickly — that “New Year, New Me” ambitious mindset is great, but if you’re like most people, by mid-January, you’ve probably already lost steam and realized that learning a new language in single month was maybe just a bit too aggressive. Similarly, going cold turkey on quitting a bad habit or attempting things like the increasingly popular “dry January” can feel a bit extreme if it’s a brand new goal.
Instead, use shorter time-frames as a test run, and if you succeed, incrementally increase the timeframe and intensity of your goals. Setting shorter-term goals also allows you to be more realistic — because life is always going to get in the way.
Things like weekend plan interruptions, personal emergencies or plain old cheat days will inevitably happen — we’re only human, after all. But by setting a goal for just the next five days, you can rest or take a small break afterwards as you need without feeling getting completely derailed and discouraged. This is why mini-goals work so well — they are easily repeatable and much less intimidating than attempting to make sudden, significant, permanent shifts in our behavior.
“You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say, ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ You do that every single day, and soon you have a wall.”
– Will Smith
Continuously Track, Revisit and Adjust Your Goals
Mini-goal setting is really just creating good habits in disguise. So after a few weeks, it’s important to stop and review how things are going. You may find that you’ve been easily crushing some tasks first thing each morning, but there are others that you’ve made zero progress on. By constantly recalibrating and tweaking your goals to fit your needs, you can maximize what’s working and which goals you might need to break up into even smaller bits — if not, a month could fly by without you realizing that you aren’t making any progress.
By getting visual and physically writing things down (old-school pen to paper style!) you’ll be more easily able to recognize patterns, drop-offs, and momentum shifts in your day-to-day behavior.
If you’re looking for the perfect way to track your goals, check out Tidy Plan’s collection of printable calendars and habit trackers — they are the perfect, easy-to-use tools for monitoring and comparing your progress over the course of a few weeks or months.
You've got this! 💪🏼
