You may have heard this one…
Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time!
And that is exactly what we are going to do in this exercise — break your big goals down into bite-size pieces.
Let’s start by distinguishing long-term vs. short-term goals.
We define long-term goals as anything that takes more than 90 days to achieve. Short-term goals take 90 days or fewer.
Most of the goals you picked are probably long-term goals — which is why in this lesson we’re going to focus on how to break down these long-term goals into more bite-sized and achievable short-term goals.
You may have picked long-term goals such as:
- Save $20,000 for a down payment on a house.
- Lose 25 pounds.
- Start and grow a side hustle to $50K/year so you can quit your day job.
All of these are great goals — but most people can’t achieve them in 90 days.
Why use 90-Day goals?
A 90-Day goal demands action right away. It’s the perfect length of time both to combat procrastination and to help you see measurable results in a short amount of time.
We dramatically underestimate how much we can get done in two or three years. But equally, we overestimate how much we can get done in a day or a week.
90 days is in the sweet spot — we can estimate accurately what can get done and then actually make progress towards achieving our goal.
How to break bigger goals into 90-Day goals
Step 1: Write down your long-term goals in your worksheet.
Step 2: Ask yourself — what can you realistically achieve in the next 90 days?
Step 3: Write down your 90-Day goal.
So for the long-term goals, we used in our example, this might look like:
- Long-term goal: Save $20,000 for a down payment on a house.
- 90-Day goal: Save $3,000 towards your down payment.
- Long-term goal: Lose 25 pounds.
- 90-Day goal: Lose 12 pounds in 90 days.
- Long-term goal: Start and grow a side hustle to $50K/year so you can quit your day job.
- 90-Day goal: Write a business plan and find your first 3 customers.
Once you’ve written down your goals for the next 90 days, share them with us in the comments below…
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