How to Set Goals for Your Life & Business
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How to Set Goals for Your Life & Business
If you’ve recently started a side hustle, are in the beginning stages of developing your business, or are several years in, you need to set some actionable and measurable goals. This will help you to have a plan to move forward and can provide some parameters on which steps or actions to focus on first.
Throughout this series, I’m talking about both life and business goals. Business goals make up only a portion of your whole life, and depending on the season you are in will have a greater or smaller role in your overall picture.
Setting goals for your life and your business helps direct you to where you want to end up. Most importantly setting direction can help get you moving. It's much easier to steer a moving ship than one parked in the harbor–true wisdom of old. In fact, it often takes a tugboat to get you going.
Does setting goals guarantee success? Nope.
Will you accomplish more with a destination in mind? Absolutely.
If you are tired of sailing in circles, so to speak, and letting the whim of the day set your course, try setting some small goals, then reward yourself along the journey whenever you reach a milestone no matter how big or small.
Let's start at the beginning, shall we? I find it much easier to get on board with something if I understand the “why” behind it. So that’s exactly where we will start, why should we set goals in the first place?
Here’s my list of 5 reasons why we should set goals.
Gets you dreaming and thus inspired about the future and what might be possible
Provides a little spark, the inspiration you need to start
Narrows the path to follow
Defines your first and next steps forward
Provides a framework to evaluate how effective your plan and actions are
Let’s dive in with a little more detail. Why should we set goals?
1 | Gets you dreaming and thus inspired about the future and what might be possible
I like to have a possibility in mind and a reason behind the decisions I make. I like to begin my yearly planning with a broad brainstorming session. I like to dream about my future. Some years are harder to do this than others. It's a great time to reset from a difficult season and refocus on a growth mindset rather than a “Woah is me” one.
First, I like to look at what tasks I enjoy doing, my inherent preferences, as well as things I’d like to do and places I’d like to go. When I take this approach and allow myself to dream, my outlook is positive and my life and work are more enjoyable. When I fail to take time to dream, my views tend to be too narrow, diminishing the possibilities, and my talents.
You need a place to record your thoughts-brain dump style, inspirational photos to help you visualize your dreams, and a system to organize, prioritize, and make your items actionable and measurable within a specific time frame.
For the brain dump, I like to use the notes app on my phone. It's quick, easy to find, and with you most of the time. You can even pin the note to the top to make it even easier to find.
For my source of inspirational photographs, I use a combination of Pinterest, Unsplash, and flipping through a physical magazine. For Pinterest, I create a goals board, look up specific words related to my goals and pin the images that speak to me the most. On Unsplash I take a similar approach, but download the images to my computer and move them into a Goals-Photos folder.
To organize my goals I use Asana. This free app has transformed my sticky note obsession and keeps me on track. Inside Asana under my Executive Team category, I create a Goals project. I use the list view to create 10 year, 5 year, current-year goals, Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 sections. I add in the 10, 5, and this year's goals as tasks under each section. Then I break the Quarter goals into monthly and weekly action steps.
Here’s a bullet list of what to do to get started:
Brain Dump
Find inspirational photos
Organize your goals
The next reason to set goals is it:
2 | Provides a little spark, the inspiration you need to start
After going through the dreaming and inspiration step above, I take the inspirational photos and create a collage for the year.
This could be as simple as cutting out some photos out of a magazine and pinning them up on a corkboard in your office. I’ve done this and it serves as a great motivator to just glance up and remember why you are doing the hard and mundane things.
This year, I’m using the free graphic design program, Canva, to create my collage. Most of my inspirational images are digital this year, so it makes the most sense. After opening up Canva, I searched for a collage template and selected the one I liked best.
One of the fantastic things about Canva is the vast number of templates they have pre-designed. It makes it so easy to just jump in and have your personalized collage in 20 minutes to an hour. I just uploaded my favorites from my inspirational pictures, added a quote or two, and my word of the year.
The third reason for creating goals:
3 | Narrowing the path to follow
There have been times in my life and my business where it just seems like the storms have tossed me to and fro until I’m a tattered and frazzled mess. Other times, I’ve had decision fatigue just looking at all the possible scenarios not knowing which path to take. This was definitely the case at the beginning of my business journey. I knew I wanted to start writing and I knew blogging was the place I’d start.
What I didn’t know was what to write about, would it be parenting, homeschooling, organizing, minimalism, moving, becoming a Christian? All of these are still options I hope to pursue, most of them I enjoy thinking about and talking about but I just never felt sure about if I'd still want to write about them in 5 or 10 years. I felt like I was spinning around in a circle over and over again, evaluating each option, weighing the pros and cons constantly–just getting dizzy. I did this for years before I finally took any action. I never gave myself a deadline to decide or really thought about the end point of starting to blog.
In the middle of this season of reading countless articles and blogs about blogging and trying every website design platform available, I finally found the direction I wanted to go. What I really enjoyed most was designing websites and the graphics to go with them. I had landed on my passion. I also wanted to take all the mystery out of tech and find simple and beautiful solutions so others wouldn’t give up before they even got started.
In the beginning, setting goals helped to narrow the path from the superhighway of the tech solutions available to ones that were simple, beautiful, and affordable. Now when I set goals, it continues to help me narrow the path.
Setting goals today helps me define the income I hope to have and the action steps I need to take to get there. Setting goals helps differentiate between all the things I could do as a small part-time strategy and design business and the specific tasks that will help me become more profitable.
The fourth why behind setting goals:
4 | Defining your first and next steps forward
Once you’ve narrowed your path and have an end in mind, you can begin to work backward to generate the action steps needed to reach your goal(s).
Let’s look at business goals to illustrate.
Think about the income goal you have as a whole. What products or services do you need to offer in order to reach this goal? How many do you need to sell?
In my case, I’d like to reach 45k this year. I offer custom design, VIP days, and Squarespace 7.1 templates. The next step is to determine how many of each product or service I need to close to reach my income target. This number will vary greatly based on the amount you charge.
For simplicity's sake, let's say I will charge $5k for custom projects, $1k for VIP days, and $300 for my templates. Any combination will get me to my goal, but I need to take into account the long-term direction I want my business to go in. I am confident about my first two offers but still working out the delivery and support I will offer for my templates. Here’s one way my specific goals for each might look:
Custom Design $5k x 6 = $30k
VIP Days $1k x 12 = $12k
Templates $300 x 10 = $3k
TOTAL = $45k
Another option if I really wanted to minimize my Custom Designs and focus on VIP days, including a plan to raise my rates, and templates might look like this example:
Custom Design $5k x 2 = $10k
VIP Days $1k x 10 = $10k
VIP Days $1.5k x 10 = $15k
Templates $300 x 34 = $10k
TOTAL = $45k
If you’ve outlined multiple scenarios, choose the one that makes the most sense and continue to drill down. We need to take these annual goals and break them down into quarterly goals and then further into monthly and weekly goals.
If my work year is totally consistent, I could simply divide my annual goals in the first example above by four and assign that amount to each Quarter:
Q1
Custom Design $5k x 1.5 = $7.5k
VIP Days $1k x 4 = $4k
Templates $300 x 2.5 = $.750
TOTAL = $12.25k
Another option when dividing up the year is to take into account periods when you want to schedule less work. For example, you have kids who will be out on summer and winter breaks. Another scenario, if you are just getting started, is to plan to complete a smaller amount of services in Q1 and increase the amount every quarter. This is how the VIP day scenario would look if you wanted to complete 12 by years end:
Q1-VIP Days free x 1 = $0k
Q2-VIP Days $1k x 2 = $2k
Q3-VIP Days $1k x 4 = $4k
Q4-VIP Days $1k x 6 = $6k
TOTAL = $12k
This is one of the ways you get to really customize your goals to your business and your life. From here we can look at how you’d like to delineate your quarterly goals into monthly and weekly goals and action steps. Let’s take the last example above and see what it could look like monthly:
Q1-VIP Days free x 1 = $0k
M1-Define VIP Offer
M2-Create VIP system & copy
M3-Test with a free trial run
Q2-VIP Days $1k x 2 = $2k
M4-Revise offer, systems & copy as needed
M5-VIP Days $1k x 1 = $1k
M6-VIP Days $1k x 1 = $1k
Q3-VIP Days $1k x 4 = $4k
M7-VIP Days $1k x 0 = $0k (Summer Break)
M8-VIP Days $1k x 2 = $2k
M9-VIP Days $1k x 2 = $2k
Q4-VIP Days $1k x 6 = $6k
M10-VIP Refine offer, systems & copy
M11-VIP Days $1k x 3 = $3k
M12-VIP Days $1k x 3 = $3k
TOTAL = $12k
The next step would be to break this down into specific tasks for each week based on your monthly goals. If we look at Month 12 (M12) above our goal is to do 3 VIP days. What day each week are we setting aside for it? What tasks need to happen for onboarding your client and setting up the workflow for the VIP day? What follow-up tasks do you have?
Additionally, what marketing efforts are you using to book your VIP days? What combination of social media, in-person networking, cold-emailing, email marketing, referrals, etc. are you going to do on which days?
What other weekly business tasks do you have to do and which day are you going to designate them to? Possibilities include content creation, newsletters, accounting, other client work, customer service.
Once you have all the weekly tasks outlined, put them in your calendar. You may use a paper planner, Google calendar, or an online project management system. Last year I started using Asana. It's a free PMS that offers additional features for a small monthly subscription.
The ultimate goal of this step is to break each goal down so you know exactly what you need to be working on every day when you start work so you're not spending precious time trying to figure that out every morning.
Having a plan guides your actions and is simply that, a plan. There will be times when you have to reevaluate your plan and sometimes reprioritize your day due to any number of reasons including illness or cancelations. But afterward, you have the choice of knowing exactly what tasks you set aside and can make the choice of how and where to fit them in the rest of your week or knowingly set them aside and move forward.
So the tasks for this step would be to:
Evaluate your goal and assign a measurable result to it.
Drill down annual goals to monthly goals.
Discern the weekly tasks needed to accomplish your monthly goals.
Add the weekly tasks to your calendar.
The final why behind setting goals:
5 | Providing a framework to evaluate how effective your plan and actions are
The key to all of this is knowing how the actions you’ve taken and the work you’ve done translate when compared to your desired outcomes. To do this you need to be certain you know what exactly to look at and what success looks like for each goal.
Financial ones are the most straightforward. Let’s look again at our M12 goal above of 3 VIP days $1k x 3 = $3k. This is a clear goal with a measurable outcome in a specified time.
Clear goal = Complete 3 VIP Days
Income = $3k ($1k x 3)
Timeframe = M12
Once your goal is clear and measurable you need to set aside time to evaluate your results. At the end of the day, take 5 minutes to look back and see if your work stayed on track and write down the top 3 tasks you accomplished.
At the end of the week spend a few additional minutes looking at where you are based on your goal. Did you complete the VIP day? Are your marketing efforts giving you enough leads to book your desired number of projects? How much time are you actually spending on the whole VIP process from lead to follow up?
If you track the number of hours it takes you to complete your VIP day, then you can figure out your hourly rate? Is it enough? Keep in mind you need to account for taxes and all of your overhead items. Were you more efficient with your VIP Day this week or month over the last one?
Then at the end of the month set aside an hour or so to review your monthly goals. Are you accomplishing your goals easily? Do you need to challenge yourself even more? Are there things you didn’t account for? Did some tasks take you more or less time than planned? Do you need to adjust your goals for the next month in order to stay on track with your annual goals?
Would you like to add good, better, and best targets to your goals? Good goals would be the baseline target you’d like to meet. Better goals would be the outcome that would be a stretch but in the realm of possibility. Best goals would be a bit beyond what you think is possible–real stretch goals.
You might surprise yourself with this one. It’s amazing how small the difference is between doubling your income when it's broken down week by week. For example breaking the six figure mark seems like a monumental milestone, but if you increase your rates or become more efficient, how much closer are you? How many more projects would you need to get there?
We’ve explored my top 5 reasons for setting goals for your life and your business. I used financial business goals throughout but similar principles carry over to the rest for your life and business.
Why wouldn’t you want to start dreaming and thus become inspired about the future and what might be possible? A little visualization can be just the spark, the inspiration you need to start moving towards your future. I for one, certainly welcome any help and discernment I can get in narrowing all.the.options. Once you’re on the path, setting goals help define your first and next steps forward. And finally having measurable goals provides you with the best framework to evaluate how effective your plan and actions are.
Next up, I will be taking a look back at my 2021 business goals.
Setting Goals Series Posts:
How to Set Goals for Your Life & Business
2021 Goals Review
2022 Life Goals
2022 Business Goals
Online Business Series Posts:
Building a website? 5 things to do before you start
How to use Square as your payment processor in Squarespace 7.1
Must use free tools for your 1st year in business: my top 3
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