You don’t have to do everyTHING at once
What makes your goals achievable? Is it the vision? Is it the timeline? Is it your knowledge and abilities? What would you think if I told you that it really just comes down to focus?
I have a couple of big projects that I needed to complete this year. I am still in the middle of one of them and a few things have become clear to me that I wanted to share with you. I have always been pretty good at multitasking and have a tendency to always take on more but the reality of things is, there are only so many hours in the day and you only have so much energy. I found that the more I took on, the more my goals were getting diluted and not getting accomplished in the time frame that I needed them to happen in. This meant something needed to change for a period of time to make them realistic.
When I started the Daily Discipline Project, I wanted to help people that struggle with everyday problems like money management, health, mindset, goal setting and other things. In the beginning I was really struggling with how to best go about this and to be honest with you this is a struggle that I am still trying to figure out. I felt as though I was losing focus on the goal of helping people and I was starting to focus on other things like picking up followers and building the platform. While I do believe it is important to have followers in order to get the message and information out to people that might need it, I do not believe that is where the focus should be. That in combination with trying to do other large projects that I have going on was really starting to weigh on me and I needed to step back and figure out my priorities.
The first step for me was to really look at the things that I wanted to accomplish and put them in a realistic lens. I had two big projects that needed to be completed within a year or less and they both were going to take up a significant amount of time. I had decided that things were taking too long by trying to work on them all at the same time. Not only was the timeline greatly affected by me working on all of these things at the same time but the quality of the work was suffering as well. So, something needed to change, and somethings needed to take a back seat for a little while.
Once I had decided exactly what I was going to work on and the order it needed to be worked on in order to make the biggest impact, I was able to get to work and focus on the thing that was right in front of me. I knew what needed to be done and when it needed to be done by. The first big project that I needed to complete took me many, many hours and I was exhausted. I currently work a full-time job with an hour commute and was putting in another 40-60 hours on top of that working on the project. I was exhausted but I knew that progress was being made because I was focusing on this one project and was using MARK (Measurable, Attainable, Rewarding, Kinetic) framework to get this project done. Knowing that it was eating up that much time makes no mystery out of why other projects would suffer and when I completed this project, I was able to start on the next one which is well under way right now.
During the time I was working on the first project I was thinking about the Daily Discipline Project and was worried that the time that I was taking off from it would negatively affect any people that were getting value from the advice and information that I was providing them but then I was reminded that I deal with the same things that everyone else does. I was struggling with this but had to make the decision to help them when I could focus more on making sure they are getting quality advice from me and not just filler. I have said in the past that if I can help even one person with this project that it would be worth it and that is still a goal of mine. I do not have all of the answers but have learned many lessons in life that I believe can help people live better lives if they listen and reflect on their own lives.
There may be times that you have to reorganize your goals and really buckle down so you can focus on one of them to make sure that it gets done in the time frame that you set and that’s OK. Just remember that if a goal was important enough for you to set it, it is important enough for you to see it to completion.
