This is part of the series How To Develop A Daily Routine. Check out more from the series!
One of the best benefits of having a daily routine is the way it helps you achieve your goals. Setting and reaching goals can be difficult without a plan or a strategy. Building that effort into your daily routine can help immensely.
I’ve discovered that people have a hard time setting goals. I know I did. People do one of three things when striving to set goal.
They rush in without a plan
Having no plan can kill your goals more quickly than anything else. If you want to go somewhere you’ve never been, you need a route to get there, a map, a strategy. The same is true for your goals. Without a strategy, you have no way of getting from where you are to where you want to be. Take the gym for example. Too many people buy a gym membership and then burn out and stop using it in a matter of weeks. Why? Because they jumped in without a plan.
Without a plan, your goals have little chance of succeeding.
They get stuck in the planning phase
I know a lot of people who want to plan out their goals in detail. They research. They read books. They talk to others. They buy what they need. They lay out a plan. But they never actually do anything.
They procrastinate
Some people desire to set goals, and many even have a plan, but they are waiting to start until next week, or after Christmas, or the new year, or their kids graduate, or… Goals will never be achieved by putting them off.
In order to combat this, you need to factor your goals into your daily routine. At the very least, you need to establish them into a weekly routine.
Having goals is great. Establishing a plan or strategy for achieving them is even better. But prioritizing the time to work on them is the only way they will see fruition.
Here are three reasons to work on your goals daily.
What you do regularly will see progress faster than what you do sporadically
Slow and steady focus on attaining your goals will see more progress than occasional bursts of effort. For example, I have an extensive library. I love books and have shelves full of them, numbering in the thousands. In order to organize them, which is one of my lower priority goals, I decided that I needed a system. I purchased software that will categorize my books. But with so many, I’m overwhelmed when I think of how to enter them all into the software. So I break this into more manageable chunks. I enter several books each day, and can see steady progress as the list grows in the database. It only takes a few moments, and my goal is seeing progress leading to fulfillment.
Working on your goals daily will help you prevent burnout
Tackling a large project all at once can easily overwhelm you. Sure, you might be able to work hard and make some significant progress for a while. But look around your house or garage. How many unfinished projects do you see? Creating a strategy to work on a project daily will help you maintain your energy and excitement for the project for the entire duration.
Take my library for example again. If I were to dive in and attempt to enter my books all at once, it won’t take long before I’m tired of data entry and overwhelmed with the project. Looking at the mass of time it will continue to consume, I will set it aside because I have more pressing things to get done.
A daily strategy will help you develop the habits needed to maintain things
Building these actions into your daily routine will soon transform them into habits. And habits are things that can be done on auto-pilot, allowing you to expend your energy on more important things.
By entering a few books each day into my library, I’m building a habit that will continue, even after I finish enter all of my current books. As I purchase new books, entering them into the library database and maintaining my work will be simple.
I’ve used the example of cataloging my personal library. But these are true no matter what you want to accomplish. One of the most important aspects of my life is my Life Plan. In this, I identified the major categories of my life that I want to prioritize, such as my spiritual growth, my relationships with my wife and kids, my ministry, and others. Once I identified these, I strategized several steps that would help me accomplish growth in each area. These steps are built into my daily routine, enabling me to work on each of them to one degree or another each day.
It is crucial to stop and review this plan regularly. I review it briefly daily, look at it more deeply on a weekly basis, deeper still each monthly, and review it in detail every six months. This allows me to see how the little, day to day, incremental work has built up into significant achievement for my goals.
I highly encourage you to think about developing your own Life Plan. It will help you transition from the person you are to the person you want to be, by enabling you to tackle your goals a little bit every day in your daily routine.
Allow your daily routine to work for you. It will help you more than you can possibly imagine.
Do you work on your goals in your daily routine? What have you found to be successful and helpful? You can leave your thoughts in the comments section below.