How To Achieve Short-Term And Long-Term Goals

Decide what your goals are

Before you go about achieving your goals, you need to actually think about what exactly they are. Make sure your they're things that you can realistically achieve: there's no point setting yourself a goal you can't achieve. For example, don't tell yourself you're going to run a marathon next month if you've never done any long-distance running before; these things take months and months of practice. When deciding what your goals are, you have to be practical and have to have some common sense about what you can do and how long it will take to do it. It also helps to make your goals very specific: saying you're going to do more exercise, for example, isn't specific. Saying you're going to do an hour a day is.

Categorise them

Once you've got a list of goals you want to achieve, separate them into short-term goals and long-term goals. Again it's important to be realistic here: do some research and see what you have to do to achieve your goals. It's also important for you to have an idea of how long it will take you to reach your goals. If something's going to take several years to do, for example getting a degree, it's going to be long-term because you're investing a lot of time in achieving that. Something like tidying your home is short-term because it's something you can get done in the near future.

Achieving short-term goals

Whenever you have things to do, being organised and having a plan is always the best way to be productive. The best way to start achieving your short-term goals is to prioritise them. When it comes to your short-term goals, decide which ones you want to get done first and go about getting them done. It helps to have a list so you can check things off as you get them done. It's important not to put things off: even if you set yourself just one short-term goal, it's important to get it done sooner rather than later.

Achieving long-term goals

When it comes to achieving long-term goals, you have to be patient and prepared to invest a lot of time into achieving them. The important thing to do is to be motivated enough to stick with it until the end. Before you start going about achieving long-term goals, do plenty of research and be sure that this is the right thing for you. It's very often the case that there are lots of steps involved when it comes to achieving long-term goals: you have to plan each step of the way there so you know what challenges you could find yourself facing. It's important to be committed and not to lose focus along the way. Before starting to achieve your long-term goals, think about what it will be like once you've achieved them. Picture where you'll be once you've achieved your goals and use this image to keep you motivated along the way.

Be flexible

Life is never simple. The problem with setting plans is that there's nearly always something beyond your control that comes along and disrupts them. Life changes and you can never fully predict how much your life will change in the next few years. The best thing to do is to stick to your plans as they are, but at the same time you have to be prepared to be flexible in case something does happen.

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