Time-Bound Goals Allow You to Achieve Work-Life Balance
When you begin working for yourself, you may feel as if you have all the time in the world to get things done. After all, you no longer have to answer to a superior about when you can come and go, take breaks, or complete projects.
There will be no more long commutes fighting traffic. Instead, you get to set your own work schedule, and this can be dangerous or effective, depending on your ability to focus and be productive. The first thing you need to think about in terms of time-bound goals is how much time do you want to invest in this career?
Some people like to work four hour work weeks, and some people like to work more than 40 hours per week. When you begin working on a business of your own, especially one you are passionate about, you may not be thinking about the time it takes to complete a project – or the time you are capable of putting in. I can tell you from my own experience, that I put in well over 40 hours, 7 days per week. But my personal/family life affords me this kind of time. But many people cannot say this and do need to find balance.
Not only do you need to have goals to make sure you work enough in your business and aren’t just slacking off watching Netflix, but you also need to make sure that you are not overworking yourself to the degree that you no longer spend time with your family, take care of your health, or even sleep.
Self-care is something that should be at the forefront of every entrepreneur’s mind. Another thing you need to think of in terms of time-bound goals is setting both short and long term goals.
You don’t want to just have a big goal in mind, such as earning six figures per year. That’s a wonderful long-term goal, but you also need to have short-term goals so that you know whether or not you are on the right track and achieving smaller milestones along the way.
If it’s a money goal, you might set goals for earning your first money every single day – regardless of the specific amount. Then increase it to $100 per day, and so on. The reason you want to have these small goals is because achieving these allows you to develop a mindset of success and it is a natural motivator.
You will have more personal satisfaction knowing that you are leveling up. If you only measure a long term goal, such as earning six figures every year, you will feel defeated when you look at the numbers and only see that you have reached a level of $80,000 a year.
This is still a huge accomplishment that should be celebrated. If you looked at all of the short term goals associated with that $80,000, you would see many days where you did reach your goal of earning $274 per day to reach a six figure result.
That means you would have plenty of wins during those 365 days, and a few days when you didn’t accomplish the short-term goal, resulting in a total of $80k instead. Time-bound goals allow you to make sure you are doing the tasks each day that will get you to where you want to be.
SMART Goals are not necessary in order to make progress online. You can still begin earning without a plan of any kind. However, if you don’t want to struggle and feel unsure of yourself, it helps to have a variety of goals in place that support you and prove that you are doing what needs to be done to achieve your dreams in the shortest time possible.
Be willing to tweak your SMART Goals to include words that work better for your particular situation and mindset. For example, let’s say you really want to earn passive income.
You have no worries that you’ll ever falter in terms of being unethical, so you can discard the term reputable and replace it with another R word. A good example for someone who wants passive income might be Recurring – as in recurring income that operates on autopilot, delivering the passive profits you are seeking.
Having this as a goal might make you remember that almost every product you promote needs to have a subscription billing option, and the products you create for customers should do the same.
Whenever you sit down each day (or week) to plan your procedures and task lists, you’ll want to refer to your SMART Goals to make sure the tasks your planning align with these goals. If not, you can tweak them early on instead of failing to realize that you’re not being intentional in moving yourself closer to your dream life.