Now that you’ve broken down your long-term goals into short-term, 90-Day goals, let’s talk about how you can further structure your goals with milestones.
The value of milestones
A milestone is a step along your path to your goals. It’s a way to see that you’re advancing towards your goals and making tangible progress. Milestones help you break big, challenging goals into more achievable mini-goals that you can focus on for a month or even a week.
For example: if your short-term goal is to lose 12 pounds in 90 days, then your 3 big milestones might be:
- Lose 4 pounds
- Lose 8 pounds
- Lose 12 pounds
So instead of wondering what you need to do to lose 12 pounds in 90 days, you can break it down into an even more achievable goal — ask yourself what you need to do to lose 4 pounds in one month.
Another example: If your goal is to run a 5K race within 90 days, each additional 1K that you can run without stopping is a milestone for you to achieve and to celebrate.
Sometimes even our short-term goals can seem too daunting, in which case it makes sense to break them down further into achievable milestones. Also, each milestone might have a different strategy associated with it, and this helps us to plan our goals in terms of milestones rather than getting caught up in trying to plan everything all at once.
What does a milestone look like?
Let’s look at a business-related goal and identify some potential milestones. Say your business goal is: Write a business plan and find your first 3 customers.
Your milestones for this might be:
- Write an initial rough draft of your business plan
- Create the final business plan
- Go to 5 networking events
- Schedule coffee or phone meetings with 15 people
- Sign the first 3 customers
Now think about how you’d achieve each of these milestones. Your strategy for the first two milestones might be very different from the strategy for the second two — so it makes sense to first break this goal down into milestones and then create a plan to achieve each milestone.
So, your next step: take some time now to break down each of your short-term goals into milestones using the attached worksheet.
There is no specific formula for breaking a goal down into milestones, just think about what the most logical steps would be along your journey to success and write them down.
Then share them with us in the comment section below…
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