So the New Year is just around the corner. It is time to stop and enjoy some time with the family, tell the wife or husband you love them as well as think about the year to come. This is a great time to reflect on last years accomplishments and set youself in the right direction for the upcoming year. Time to set some goals and stategize on how you are going to be accomplishing what you wish before next time this year, but what makes a goal a good goal?
Good, Great, GOAL!
It is not hard to just come up with a goal. It is quite easy as a matter of fact. You can come up with them all day long, but lets pick one apart, in fact, lets pick my goal apart. “I wan’t to make $1,000 dollars of residual income each month.” So we have our goal, but is it realistic? Is it measurable? Here are a handful of key terms that come to mind when goal setting:
- Written
- Challenging
- believable
- specific
- Measurable
- & Have a Specific Deadline
I think these terms sum up a goal rather well, but you do not necasarilly need all of them to make a goal a good goal. Some of the terms like believable and challenging are relative terms that may differ to person to person. While I think all goals must be measureable in some aspect otherwise you will never know if you are making progress. Specific deadlines depend strongly on the goal, it may be a lifestyle enhacement goal that really has no end. A good way to look at goals is think if they have a good plan involved. One that if follwed offers a reasonably high probability of sucess.
Lets break down my goal of “Making $1,000 a month of residual income” and see it attacked by these definitions and see if we can carve a better goal plan for it:
- Written: I have written my goal down here, as well as made a new page on the blog to remind myself what I shoot for by the end of 2010, so I have passed the first term with ease.
- Believable: I do personally believe the goal is acheivable, I read other posts and blogs that have earned and surpassed $1,000 dollars a month of residual income. The key here is the goal setter must believe, and in this case I do!
- Challenging:this will definitly be a challange for me. I have no long record of earning passive income and I am exploring new ways of doing so.
- Measurable:My goal is measurable as I will be breaking down the amount of money made each month and reporting it on this blog. Money can always be measured
- Specific:Now my goal could probably use a little love here. Clearly its specific in the long term, but could probably be a little more specific.
- Deadline: My goal does have a deadline, but in reality if I don’t meet my goal’s deadline I won’t just stop trying, as well as if I meet it earlier then the deadline I won’t keep trying to improve it.
- Your Goal
- Starting Date of Goal
- Ending Date of Goal (if there is one)
- Obstacle: People, events, cirumstances & anything that may hinder your progress on obtaining your goal.
- Task: Mini-goals that hurdle obstances as well as other items that help pursuit your goal.
- Obstacle 2
- Task 2
- Earn $1,000 of Residual Income
- January 1 2010
- December 31 2010
- Obstacle: Making money with eHow.
- Task: Write 3 eHow articles. (monthly)
- Obstacle: Affiliate Marketing Income.
- Each month research and use one product an create sale page on blog, research keywords and setup adwords campaign(monthly)
- Obstacle: Generate income through GraphicRiver.
- Task: Create 3 items for my GraphicRiver portfolio (monthly).
- Obstacle: Generate More Reader for Blogs
- Task: Create 3 quality content posts. (weekly)
- Obstacle: Monthly Income review
- Task: End of each month review what has been working, what has not been working, make necassary adjustements.
So after looking over my goal I think I can challange myself with taking this goal on, but I am going to need to make a good goal plan that I can follow. This is what tests the true integrity of a goal, for if your goal doesn’t have a plan for sucess then its just a pipe dream.
Create a Goal Plan!
Now we need to make a goal plan that we can follow to achieve our goal. We can do this by breaking down our goal into stepping stones that lead us to our big goal. It is important to make these smaller goals to help us achieve a feeling of accomplishment while we are working on our larger goals. In this goalplan we are going to identify :
The idea here is simple. Create a formula that you can follow that will keep you on track to your goals. Identify the things that prevent your goal from happening and the taks that will hurdle the obstacles and keep you going. These little goals will help you keep motivation if your goal takes more time then expected. Here is a sample of goalplan for my goal:
Now I will be following the above formula to help obtain my goals for the 2010 year, but there might be soem hiccups and that is ok, just keep trucking and working on your goals. Remember that it is ok to make changes to your goal and goal plan, review it and fix it and go back after it!
Go make your goals and lets work hard this upcoming year to achieve our goals!
Comments
Thanks moon. That is how I looked at it, if I blog about my goals it will be a written reminder to myself that keeps me motivated. The bonus is down the road you can write goal-update posts and that will keep readers inspired as well. Nothing feels better than seeing your goal slowly become reality!
Bring it New Year!
I think you have taken the first step in hitting your $1,000 target, just by writing things down. Now you have the baseline set to work from. Looking forward to reading your status! Best of luck in 2010!
Great post. I think I need to put something like this into action over the holidays. 2009 has been fun and a great learning curve for me, but I have to admit to not being focused enough.
Great post on setting Goals… I think this will be an additional page I set up for my lifestyle development blog just to create transparency and readers can learn from me.
One of my goals is to create Passive Income through 2010 so I can create the lifestyle I really want and have wanted. Another one of my goals will be to follow your blog and progress through 2010.
Great article and I look forward to our success in 2010.
Great post! I’m in the process of getting some goals down on paper as well.
John, very right you are! The first step is writing down your goals, and I think its an important one as well. This helps create a more than just a thought or feeling floating around in your head. Best of luck to you too my friend!
Des, I am glad you liked the post. Sounds like your on the right track if your acknowledging what you have accomplished in 2009 and plan to improve it in 2010. If you feel that focus is a problem then setting up a goal plan would definitely help you keep motivated, and help show you what may keep you from being focused. Thanks for stopping by the RB.
Jason, I am glad I could inspire you to get a goal page for your blog. I think it helps me because I see it when I log in and reminds me of a task I could do to help earn that oh-so-important residual income that day. I like your attitude about sharing your ups and downs with readers, really ads some nice trust with readers when you can prove what worked and what didn’t. I will help you out as much as possible along with the rest of my readers in 2010, I hope we can all learn from each other and all build great passive incomes in 2010. Cheers!
Julie, Thanks! Get those goals down and we wish you the best of luck for 2010!
Geez after this giant comment I think I need to add a reply button to my blog. 
Thanks for everyone’s comments! Best of luck to us all in 2010.
Hi, great post and I love the design of the blog – nice job!
Setting specific goals is something I now realise I’ve been avoiding within my passive income project. By not setting definitive goals I allow ‘drift’ to enter. It also becomes harder to analyse success/failure without benchmarks to measure against.
With this in mind, I’m going to state here a goal I have for my project for 2010:
50 subscribers to my blog
starts today
end in 1 year
main obstacle: generating the time to produce content that will entertain/inform people enough to want to subscribe to the blog.
Thanks RB, let’s see how we go!
Hi first of all I love the name of your blog. Super cool!
Setting goals is really the only way to accomplish anything of importance. My goals for the first six months are to:
Increase my RSS Subscribership and to make at minimum of $1500 from my blog and part time concierge service.
There now that it is written it shall be
Tim, Wow, I was totally neglecting reader goals! You just added one more item to my own goal list, increase readership! I totally know when you say ‘drift’, damn that procrastination trait that dwells within me! For the great info I have subscribed to your feed and helped you get one step closer to your goal. Thanks for your great input and welcome to the RB!
Ms. Freeman, Goals are definitely important if you are trying a new challenging task, in all of our cases we are stepping into a new world of building residual incomes and there is much trial and error. With goals we can keep the big picture in mind and help measure success along the way. I have tallied one more to your subscription feed and wish you the best of luck with your $1,500 dollar goal. Thanks for you great comment and welcome the the RB.
Good roundup of what makes a goal more attainable!
Goal-setting is definitely very important, but I personally think that the whole new-years resolution thing isn’t ideal. It’s just too normal for people to make their resolutions and then do nothing about them.
And for me personally, it’s always been more useful to set shorter-term goals. Following pretty much the same principles you describe, though.
Hi Shane, and welcome to the RB.
I agree that the New Year’s resolutions are weird, and I did not intend this to be a new years resolution, but see how it may be seen that way. To me new year resolutions are things like, quit smoking, go to the gym, more of self improvement stuff.
Thanks for your comment, and look forward to having you around. Cheers.
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- About ResidualBacon
ResidualBacon.com is one man's journey and guide to building a stable and fruit bearing residual income tree. Tyler first started earning a small amount of passive income on a whim and a light turned on in his head. He plans on sharing his insights and reviews along the way.
Tyler, awesome post! I really love this. I had been thinking about my own goals, but what’s better than blogging about it? In fact, I might do better if I announce it on my blog and try to hit each goal.
I know what you mean about eHow–my brain is fried, haha. I have to think of new how to articles and keep going.
Can’t wait to see what the New Year brings us… or what we bring to the new year