The longest chapter in every success story is the one on determination.
While success demands a lot from us, willpower and determination are always at the top of the list. Many people believe that we are born with determination and that those who succeed are simply the lucky ones who are born with abundant supplies. But if you ask any successful person, they'll tell you that they haven't been born more resolutely; they've always found a way to harness and use what they have more effectively.
Whatever your goal, whether it's a project, career, personal life, health, or finance, it's easy to get distracted. There are many things that lead us to lose sight of our intentions. From clutter to family and friends, hobbies and an ever-important sleep schedule, house chores, the lure of social media, and just events in your life, it's a surprise anyone can get anything done.
How to remain focused
With all these things drawing your attention in a number of directions, often at once, how do you keep to the task of achieving your goals?
1. Set SMART Goals: The acronym SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant/realistic/recorded and time-bound. That means having goals with a structure to help you plan and track your progress.
2. Create a Picture of Success: It often helps to visualize your goals. Know what it will look like and the goal moves from an abstraction to a real, attainable thing.
3. Keep Them in Sight: Have a list of the tasks you need to complete; make sure there’s a schedule and have it calendared so it’s clear and deliberate. It can also help to have some visuals such as pictures to keep you focused.
4. Identify & Remove Distractions: Remember those pesky distractions? Now it’s time to do something about them. Some things that pull us away from work are unavoidable and important, but others are time-wasters. Make the distinction and terminate with extreme prejudice those distractions that can be lost.
5. Avoid Procrastination: Procrastinating comes in many forms, from taking a coffee break to overdoing it with research. It’s important to nip this tendency in the bud. Get an accountability partner to keep you on track. Sometimes it helps to do the hardest tasks first or the easy ones first, whichever will keep you busy. Regardless, don’t wait to do something. Start early and get it done.
6. Prioritize: One way to help gain order from the chaos of the many tasks you must accomplish to reach your goal is to prioritize them. Not all tasks are created equally, some are critical, while others could be left to the last minute as they’re not so important. Therefore, some you need to pay more attention to than others, but you won’t know until you prioritize.
7. Visually Track Progress: To get to your goal you must know where you are. That means having tools to track your progress, using tasks and milestones to break a big project into more digestible parts, and being able to see where you currently are in the big picture.
Staying focused on your goals is hard. In the beginning, we’re certainly motivated. But we all know how that motivation wanes over time. We get caught up, stuck, frustrated, overloaded, overworked, distracted, and we simply just veer off track. Clearly, it’s hard to stay focused when we have so much going on. In the back of our minds, we know that those excuses will only take us so far. Yes, it’s easy to let life get the best of us, but it’s not okay to veer so far off track that we forget what we truly wanted out of life and why we really wanted it. So staying focused on our goals is not only important, it’s crucial.
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