If you know me, you’ll be looking at that title, scratching your head and going ‘You? You think there’s a problem with goals?’ because I love goals.  I, for a long time, shared Monthly Goals and Yearly Goals.  I still like goals, just as I like To-Do lists!  But that doesn’t mean there is not still a problem with them, or at least, a problem with how we view and approach goals… let me explain.

The Result

Goals are almost always the end result.  They are the success at the end of a journey.  Maybe your goal is to write a novel or build muscle or completely reorganise your room or hit 1000 blog followers… they are all endings.  The final product or completion.

This is good.  After all, you need to know what you are aiming for.  You need to have an idea of what the image of “success” is to help guide you towards it.  It’s why people suggest making your goal clear and concise.  Not something too vague or nebulous.

The Problem

So what is the problem with goals?  Nothing in and of themselves.  But we make goals, write them down in lists, on our blogs, in our diaries, on our walls… and we focus on them.  The END result.  On the end of the journey that we have to take to GET to that end result.

It’s one of the reasons that New Years’ Resolutions fail.  Also, we hate starting things at the beginning of the year.  It’s cold, dark, and miserable and you are having to drag yourself into work, you’re eating leftovers from Christmas because you cooked for 45 people when only 8 were visiting.

Fixating on the end result, the goal – won’t get you as far as you think.  Say you wanted more blog followers, checking your stats every week isn’t going to make it happen.

The Steps To Take

If you are creating goals or resolutions, you need to always think about the steps.

These can be the steps you have to take to reach that goal.  What do you need to do?  Say you want more blog followers, maybe your first step is research.  This could be finding out important keywords, trends, best days to post, and new places to share your blog.

The second step might be to increase your blogging to once a week or twice a week. And then making sure to hit those important days.

The third step could be to share your blog more in new locations such as blog directories.

Very often the goal has several steps and there isn’t one main way to reach the goal.  Maybe while looking for more blog followers you thought, “I’ll write more content”.  That’s good, more content means a more active blog, which means you’ll get crawled more by Search Engine Spiders etc.

However, that’s just one part.  You might need fresher content and different mediums like pictures and video.  If you aren’t making all this new content search engine friendly you are losing an opportunity.  Maybe you are creating too much content and it’s putting people off.

So for each goal write down all the different steps and methods you could get there.  Also, what are you tracking?  Checking the details to see if you are actually hitting your goal is good.

So say you wanted 100 new subscribers.  You may want to track, every month, how much new content you created, what your stats say about what days/times and locations people visited your blog, and see if there are patterns.

Does adding new pet content increase your viewership?  How about posting on the weekends?  Just checking how many subscribers you get in a month isn’t going to give you the same data you can use.

Maybe you’ve shared your blog on a new directory and got no hits, and then maybe you shared it on a specific social media and got tons of hits.  That can shift your attention to aiming more for social media rather than directories etc.

Plan For Success

Every time I shared goals, I (almost) always had a plan and steps on how to reach them written in my Goals Notebook.  They weren’t always the best and most thought-out steps, something I got hung up on that shiny goal that I stopped focusing on the steps I needed to take to get me there.

But the goals I completed during the months and years, were most often the ones with laid-out steps on what I needed to do (regularly) and what I should track to see if I was going in the right direction.

I know as we draw towards 2023, people will be making big grand plans for next year and what they want to accomplish.  So if you are making your goals list, consider adding a separate list for each goal and listing out what you need to do to hit that goal and if it works for you, a deadline for each step to keep you on track.

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I’ve ordered myself a brand spanking new planner for 2023, I love a new planner, so I can list out my goals and the steps I need to get me there.  If you’re making those goals and plans, I wish you luck in completing them!

Happy writing & stay safe

I write articles on writing, marketing, blogging, organising, social media, books and some random stuff.  I also create free printable resources.  If you find my content helpful and entertaining, consider supporting me on ko-fi (where you will also find extra content I post).  All donations go to keeping my website running and helping me move towards publishing my novels.