» Why You Should Review Goals Regularly

We’ve been doing some thinking lately.

Not that we don’t think all the time but, like many people, we have a tendency to get stuck into things and get on with them, not always stepping back and taking a look at the whole picture as often as we might.

A few days ago we sat down and had a discussion, the outcome of which was that we decided we aren’t too happy about some of the things that we’re doing:

Fail to revisit your goals regularly and you may get bogged down in unnecessary clutter

We’ve fallen into routines that have become stale and sometimes frustrating

We’re doing things not because we want to, but because we think we should

We’re losing focus on what really matters – to us!

We’re wasting a lot of time going down paths that aren’t leading us to where we want to be

We’re collecting a lot of resources that we’re unlikely to use

The upshot is that we agreed to take a break and spend some time thinking about what we really want to achieve in our lives, and how our current plans and activities fit in with this.

Inevitably there will be things we discard. These are things that, in hindsight, we no longer want to pursue. Things that don’t satisfy us or don’t contribute to our current goals. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s not wise to set a goal ‘in stone’ as no-one knows what is likely to happen tomorrow or next week. Often circumstances will change meaning that the goal – or the steps planned towards it – needs to be modified. This is called REAL LIFE!

This doesn’t mean that setting goals should be entered into lightly, or not set at all. When we originally made our plans we were committed to them, and we set about translating the goals into actions methodically. Time moved on, things changed; these changes impacted on our original plans. We aren’t discarding things lightly either. We’ve had a lot of discussions about how and why things have changed, and what we should do about it.

The danger in this situation is that we could fail to make the changes we’ve now identified. After all, we’ve put an awful lot of time and effort into things over the last year. There’s a tendency to want to hang on, to retain things that have already been created even if they no longer fit into the picture, just because of the time and effort we’ve already invested in them. But this would be wrong. Unless we’re willing to discard and move on we won’t really move on.

One of the first actions we’re taking is to de-clutter. For us this is mostly a virtual de-clutter: sorting through all those computer-based resources we’ve accumulated and dumping those we don’t need (including those multiple copies of things we filed in several places so they’d always be handy!). This is a time investment that will eventually free up our time as it should be easier to find things. Plus, we can be more confident that the resources we’ve retained are things we will actually use. Then we just need to apply these excellent criteria to anything new that comes our way!

Once completed we’ll not only have a ‘lighter’ computer, we’ll have cleared some of the fluff from our minds and be ready and motivated to start afresh in a slightly different direction from that we were heading in before. And still on track to achieve our life goals.…