Reaching a goal requires a strong anchor to your vision. And it is not just that.
When you have a spirit that goes in many directions, you need to find the right amount of discipline to achieve your objective. Not too much discipline, though, unless you are very good at managing your mind already, which, I believe, comes overtime.
So we first need to find a way to put you in the right rail from a time perspective.
Put some order in your tasks
The first thing you will do is to look at all the tasks you have already identified for your goal. You will then decide how big is the task, in terms of complexity for you.
You can use a t-shirt sizing: XS (super easy), S, M, L and XL (very difficult or never done before).
For the L and XL tasks, consider splitting them into smaller pieces. And size each of these smaller chunks as well.
Once you have all your tasks listed, identify a priority. You do not need to get this priority right. You just need to define an order so that you can start. You can prioritize by importance for you, for stakeholders, or balance between the value you will create vs the time it will take to focus on quick-wins first. There are many ways to do it.
Decide on your time commitment
Now you have your list in order, decide how much tasks you can achieve – for this goal specifically – within a week.
Make it as realistic as possible, taking the rest of your constraints into consideration. If you struggle in this exercice, think about prioritizing your different projects or activities differently. I’ll right a blog post about this 🙂
Do all the things
Then, as you move on your week, pick one task after another. Complete them, one task at a time, to make sure you keep the focus on it. If you lose the focus, consider splitting the task into something even smaller, so you are sure to complete it.
As you move on and prove yourself you can finish more and more tasks, you might be able to take items taking more time to complete. But for now, try the amount of time per task and the number of tasks to be done within a week that you can cope with.
Even if it’s two tasks, even if it’s one hour within your week, go for it.
What matters is not the time it takes, but your ability to move on and keep the pace steadily.
