Declutter Your Life With Smart Goals

by monique on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 | No Comments

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Declutter your life and make a place for those smart goals in your life.

What is a smart goal you may ask?

Smart goals is an acrostic to help people remember the important points that make personal goal setting effective. Smart stands for;

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely

To set a specific goal you must answer the six “W” questions: Who, What, Where, When, Which, and Why.

To determine if your goal is measurable, ask questions such as……How much? How many? How will I know when it is accomplished?

Attainable – When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them.

To be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work. A goal can be both high and realistic; you are the only one who can decide just how high your goal should be.

Last but not least, a goal should be grounded within a time frame. With no time frame tied to it there’s no sense of urgency.

These are all critical components of smart goal setting that will motivate you to achieve the goals you set for yourself. First, you want to make your goal as specific as possible. You want to ensure your goal is detailed and describes exactly what you want.

However, what if you want to further your career by taking an online course. Take a look at your life and see how much time do you actually have available.

Will a new smart goal fit into your life if you are already rushing every day to complete the tasks you have to do in terms of your commitments to work, your relationships, the new hobby you have, your volunteer work, and never mind keeping in touch with your friends?

Where in the busy schedule would a online course fit? Not very likely. But you sign up for it anyway. Within the first month you find yourself not attending the conference calls and not doing what is required. You just don’t have time.

You need to make way for that smart goal if you are serious about achieving it. University Business Schools know all about the fall off rate of students who sign up for MBA’s or Management Advancement Programs.

The drop out rate is something like 40% within the first term of the course and only about 70% or so finish. And yet at sign up time every student is informed as to how much time they will need to free up for this course.

Somehow in our minds the time available to us has an elasticity that has no limit. Of course this is not the case and many times we set ourselves up for failure by not decluttering our lives sufficiently to make time to achieve a smart goal we have set.

Review your day and see where you spend your time. What part of your time is being wasted on non-essential activities? Which of those activities can be let go and which activities have to be kept?

How To Organize Your Life and Get Rid of Clutter

Declutter your life and get rid of the clutter that keeps you frantically busy but that gets you absolutely nowhere.

We all have mountains of clutter around. This could be physical clutter that means that every time we are looking for something it takes twice the time to find. It could be tasks that we have taken on ourselves such as doing all the housework while our partner watches TV that easily eliminate our free time.

Or it could just be too many repetitive activities such as scanning our email several times a day instead of once a day, or finding a quicker route to work, or using an easier shop close by for the daily grocery requirements. All it needs is a closer look at what you fill your day with and with some clever planning you could free substantial time for all sorts of great achievements.

Review everything you do in a regular day whether this needs doing or whether it can be dumped to the trash can of bad habits. You will be surprised how much time you spend on aimless tasks that add no value to your life.

Just by doing this one thing alone by canceling some of the time spent in front of the TV could help you find the time needed to achieve a wonderful goal such as learning how to have financial freedom in your life.

Smart goals is a great way to stay motivated throughout the year and being organized is not a personality trait. It’s a skill anybody can learn.