How do successful people set their goals?

No matter who you are today and what you wish to be in your life tomorrow, you would be having some goals and dreams. Everyone in the world does.

And for every individual goal and vision, there’s a self-help book or article giving out steps to achieve them. While some offer genuine concrete advice, there are many that either give impossible to follow through solutions or ones that are clickbait-like, offering no real solution.

We talked to a handful of entrepreneurs to get an understanding of how they devise their goals. Let’s look at some ways we identified, which helped the entrepreneurs get success in their respective fields.

A. Scheduling a Strategic Time Everyday

One of the main goal setting hack is finding out an uninterrupted hour everyday as strategic time. Scheduling a time to work on your goals inside your calendar and making it visible to whoever has access to it, ensures that everyone on the team understands that this time of yours is non-negotiable.

B. Reverse Engineer

You should add in long and short term goals when planning for a good future. Once you have the picture ready, break it down and think of what you have to accomplish in the first week, the first month, and then the first year.

Envision your career or your business in a five year plan and then work backwards to know what will have to be done to get there.

C. Have a Plan B

The biggest mistake we make when we make goals and plans is work under the assumption that you will be able to achieve them. This way, when things don’t work out, as they tend to sometimes, you are not left with any other action plan.

Having a Plan B assists you in taking confident decisions and staying level-headed when things go off route.

D. Don’t let KPIs Become Your End Goal

In place of concentrating on KPIs and metrics, focus on doing work that brings you closer to your goal. This way, you will be able to see clearer milestones instead of being pulled down by KPIs which more often than not, swing in the opposite direction for reasons that are rarely in your control.

E. Set Goals for all of Life’s Facets

Majority of experts and also the plethora of goal setting articles focus on career and business related goals — how to earn money, increasing sales commission, etc being some of them. There is nothing wrong with this. It is completely understandable. However, a relentless focus on career often takes you towards unhappiness and lowered productivity.

All the successful people take out time for defining leisure goals, health and fitness goals, and their personal growth goals. It will be a dire mistake to presume that other parts of your life will automatically fall into place, no matter how your career goal is moving.

F. Time Sensitivity

Majority of the people who set up goals have a hard time sticking to a time range and more often than not, end up underestimating the time it would take to perform a job. Successful goal-getters are a lot more time-sensitive than the general population. They are much more realistic about time that they have and it would take them to start and complete different tasks.

G. Estimating Difficulty

The problem with difficulty estimation is that we rarely estimate the time it would take to complete a new task or goal. When setting goals on a new task, it is very important to know that real changes call for real work. Working with the expectation that a task will be easy or something won’t be a problem, can backfire very badly in the long run when you encounter problems that delays your goal achieving time.

Successful people plan keeping difficulty estimation in mind. This prevents them from disappointments which occur when challenges arise later.

Here are some of the things that successful people follow when it comes to attaining goals within time and within expectations. What other goal getting practice do you think people should have? Share with us in the comments below.