It’s the perfect time to complete them by the end of the year
Setting goals for yourself is one way to make sure you continue moving forward in your life. But it’s hard to know just how far out to set your goals. Set 3-month goals if you want to see continuous growth and progress.
Staying focused on one thing for 12 months can be a challenge. Think back to January, do you even remember what New Year’s Resolution you set for 2019? If so, you have three months left before the end of the year. What steps have to take toward your goal? Can you make it in this last stretch?
Why Set 3-Month Goals
Twelve weeks is a short enough time to keep our momentum up and complete some things we want to get done. It’s better to break our yearly goals down into smaller attainable sections by setting 3-month goals.
If you are getting started on your yearly goal now, that’s okay. You can always reset your goals and change their deadlines if they weren’t time-sensitive. You may be able to accomplish more than you think in 3-months if you are focused.
Let’s Look at An Example
For example, if I wanted to have 100 blog posts by the end of 2019, but realized that I’m only at 51, I could reset my goal. Now I decide with 12 weeks left, I’ll write 2 posts a week and finish the year with 75 blog posts instead.
This will work better for me because if I tried to get to 100 in just 12 weeks, I would likely give up in the next week or two knowing I just don’t have the ideas and the time to make so many quality posts in that amount of time. Changing my goal to be more attainable will motivate me to do more. It’s close to my original goal, and by cutting the timeframe down, I’m much more likely to take action. Even if I complete half of my new goal, I’ll be in a better place.
The same rule works for anything like weight loss or learning a language. At the end of each three months, you can re-evaluate how you did and decide if you want to set the same goal again. If it was too difficult or too easy, you might adjust it.
If you start your 3-month goals now, you will finish the year strong and motivated to start the next year with more goals that will help you move toward your life vision.
Each time you accomplish a goal, you feel good. So setting shorter-term goals makes sense for your mental and emotional health. So why not set even shorter goals?
While its fun to challenge yourself every once in a while to a week-long challenge, setting goals for one month or less is not the most productive. If you don’t get started right away, you can give up quite early by deciding its too late, and impossible to complete the goal. Research has shown that 3-months is a reasonable time frame.
How to decide which goals to set
If you didn’t set yearly goals that you can go back and revisit, you may be wondering what would make sense for you to start now. The truth is, you don’t need a new year, a new month, or even a new week to start a goal. It’s just a pattern that many of us use. But you may have time-sensitive goals that make sense for this time of year.
Maybe your goal is to have all of your Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving so you can relax and enjoy the holiday season. Perhaps you want to run a 5k or save up enough money to do something special for New Year’s. Whatever goal you have in mind, you don’t need a special day to start. I just like to use the end of the year as a little extra motivation.
I like to set personal goals as well as professional goals. Some areas of life that you may want to look at our personal development, career, health and fitness, relationships, money, and so on.
By setting goals and achieving them, you take responsibility for your life and determine the direction that it’s moving in. Where do you want to go before 2020?
Originally Published on Medium 9/30/2019