Achieve Your Goals by Focusing on Critical Activities

What are your critical activities? Criticalactivities are those activities that directly move you towards yourgoals.  Every goal has critical activities.  The problem is that most ofus spend significant amounts of time doing things that are notcritical.  Often we convince ourselves that they are something we ‘need’to do to be successful, but usually they are things that are notcritical.

Step #1 – Identify your goals

You can’t know what the critical activities are if you don’t first have a clear understanding of what your goals are.  You need to understand where you are going before you can know how to get there.Go beyond just labeling something as your goal, get a grip on WHY youwant to achieve your goal.  Before you plan how to get to your vacationdestination you first need to know where you are going and what you wantto do when you get there.  Your destination is your goal, and what youwant to do when you get there is your WHY.

Step #2 – List major outcomes needed to achieve your goal

For each goal make a list of the outcomes that you need to complete in order reach that goal.These outcomes should be the major results that lead to achieving yourgoals.  You may view these as the steps along the way, or the mainaccomplishments needed to move you forward.  If your goal is to increaseyour coaching business your major outcomes will be finding new clientsand keeping your existing clients.  These would be the two majoroutcomes that if you continue to do will certainly help you achieve yourover arching goal.

Step #3 – Determine the activities needed

Inthis step you need to take your outcomes from step #2 and break themdown into all of the activities that are needed to get you to thoseoutcomes.  There are likely several activities needed for each outcome.These can be broken down into small bite sized action chunks. Continuing with the goal of expanding your coaching business, you wouldlist all the activities for each of the two major outcomes.  For examplefor finding new clients you would have things such as building yourprospect list, networking, phoning potential prospects, increasing yourweb presence, offering seminars or podcasts etc…  Think through all thethings you do to move you towards each major outcome.

Step #4 – Limit the list to the critical activities

Onceyou have your list of activities you need to reduce the list to onlythose activities that are absolutely critical for achieving your goals. These are the things that must be done.  To find out if one of theactivities you have recorded is critical or not, ask yourself what would happen if you stopped doing it.If you quit doing one of the critical activities you will quit movingtowards your goals.  If you quit something that is not critical you maymiss it but it won’t prevent you from reaching your goals.  Often thecritical activities are not the easy activities.  They require steppingout of your comfort zone.  For each goal you should aim to have between 4and 8 critical activities.

Step #5 – Take action on the critical.

After you have identified the critical activities you need to take action on those activities.  Reduce the time and focus you give to the non-critical activities.By now you have likely realized that some things you spend time on arenot critical.  Non critical activities for me include cleaning myoffice, surfing the web endlessly, communicating with friends onFacebook etc..  Certainly there are times where these activities areappropriate and even needed, however that is not when I am workingtowards my goals.  When you have set aside time to focus on yourbusiness or other goals only do critical activities.   To do this youmay need to block out distractions.  This might mean closing your emailboxes, shutting of your twitter tweets, and perhaps even turning off theringer on your phone.  Get rid of the non-critical things that mightdistract you from the critical.

Step #6 – Do this for each goal

Likelyyou will have more than one goal in your life.  You may have businessgoals, work goals, family goals, fitness goals etc.  For each goal area you can work through this process.If your goal is to lose you may identify the major outcomes of eatingbetter and exercising more.  From there your critical activities mightbe: 1. exercise daily  2. cook better meals 3. measure our your servings4. record everything you eat.   Every area of your life has criticalactivities and time wasters.

By taking the time to work throughthese steps you can focus on the critical and avoid the time wasters. You will make more progress towards your goals more quickly.