Ep. 79 Plan With Me For The Next Three Months: A Step-by-Step Framework For How To Stay On Track With Your Goals

0:00Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. For a limited time at McDonald's, get a Big Mac extra value meal for$8.

0:34That means two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun, and medium fries, and a drink. We may need to change that jingle. Prices and participation may vary. Hi, friends. Grace from the Working Hard podcast here. When you're stretching every dollar, Allila goes a long way, and Walmart Business is here to help. They make it easy to order what you need from tech and cleaning supplies to everyday essentials, all at low prices, and with helpful tools like spend tracking and tax-exempt purchasing for eligible organizations. because when your operations are smooth, your impact can be bigger.

1:05Visit business.warmart.com to get started.

1:16Hello, what is up and welcome to another episode of Working Hard Hardly Working. At the end of last year, I did a plan with me episode and I was taking you through how I plan my goals for 2024, but also my kind of step-by-step process for how I believe very strongly there's a very strong belief how I believe you should be goal setting if you choose to goal set and I also think everyone should choose to goal set even if it is just for five minutes because you cannot reach success if you do not define success. Anyway so that's what I did at the end of last year and it was one of the most popular episodes ever and so many of you asked for regular check-ins and I kind of thought what better for a check-in than when you kind of get to March, you're a few months into the year, you feel warmed up, like don't get me wrong I really had the January bug this year but I don't always and I don't feel like it's necessarily like the only time of the year that you can implement goal setting.

2:08So today as we approach the three-month mark I'm going to take you through how I check in at this stage of the year and go through quarterly reflection and goal setting. I'll be doing it a little bit earlier so that I can do it in a way that kind of shares that with you but I just thought if the first few months of the year for you have been a whirlwind. You've got the tools to get back on track. If you feel like you're already on track, then also to make sure that you're replicating this success throughout the rest of the year, because it is so easy to set lots of goals in January and to feel like you have, as I said before, you get that dopamine release by feeling like you've reached those goals just because you're writing them down and they're exciting.

2:47It is so important to check in with this throughout the year. A year is not an accumulation of the first three months. It is an accumulation of 365 days. So let's talk through this. Some of my goals this year were fitness related. So I'm going to make sure to touch on how I keep track with my fitness goals as well as career and personal development and all of the different sides of kind of where we talked about how you should be setting goals. Just for some important information, a recent Forbes study has shown that only 6 % of us managed to stick to one New Year's resolution. One. So if that doesn't show you that there's a problem with the way you're goal setting and generally people are goal setting, I don't know what will.

3:25So anyway, let's talk about how to check in at three months, how to set some goals for the next three months and how to make sure that January is not the only time of the year that you actually act like you're going into a new year and you have goals to reach because that is a disservice to yourself and you know what we're not doing this year is disservicing ourselves, okay? Okay, so we're going to be going through this step-by-step. Get used to this step-by-step process because it will tweak each time, but it's a framework that you should be using throughout the year in different things any time you're setting goals.

3:59So first things first, we are back with our old friend, reflection, because what can we do nothing without? Self-awareness. Every month I like to do a check-in on how I'm feeling and how I'm progressing with my goals and generally my life as well, because you might be progressing well with your goals and you might also realize that they are not the goals that you want anymore. I think it's easy to procrastinate when reflecting so I've boiled it down to three simple questions that I ask myself. This is not an exercise in working out how long you can write an essay on yourself. I'm not interested in that, your goals are not interested in that, you can do that when you're journaling, that is not what we are doing right now.

4:31So these three questions. Number one, did I achieve my top three goals for the last few months? So if you're looking at this now in March back to January, did you achieve those goals. You have to have your January goals side by side. If you didn't do them, that's absolutely fine. We're going to have some reflection questions in here for you, but you can spend this time writing down generally just a perception of how you feel like your past three months or month or whatever time period you're reviewing went. Then also I want you to write down what went well and then also what could have gone better.

5:06Spend a little bit of time on this. You need to get in touch with what you think you did well, what you didn't do well. As I've said before, we have nothing without self-awareness okay I cannot express that for you enough no one else is going to give you self-awareness it is your duty to get self-awareness and if you don't have self-awareness no one's going to tell you off you're just not going to be able to get to things as closely okay so I do this for both my personal and professional goals and it helps me to check in on how I'm progressing without feeling guilty for skipping one day and kind of packing it all in the real key to sticking to goals is not giving up if they go slightly awry having an all or nothing attitude means that you have an all or nothing attitude and you know what's going to happen there you're going to get nothing because you're not going to, there is going to be no circumstance ever where you get every single thing right.

5:47So you're setting yourself up for nothing, like the key is in the name. That all or nothing attitude means giving yourself the option of giving up at every opportunity. And you can be that person. Honestly, you can, like no one is going to stop you being that person. But I would personally advise that if you want to reach these goals that we have talked about and spent time talking about and spent time going through, don't have that attitude. Now, if you didn't do your January goal setting and you're coming into this from the first position. First of all, I would actually recommend that you watch the January episode.

6:15It doesn't need to be about setting goals at the beginning of the year. That is a construct. It doesn't even fucking exist. But what does exist is the good framework that I actually talked through from the beginning in terms of setting goals from square one. But with that in mind, the types of reflection you should be asking yourself also now that we talked about back then is number one, what are my top five motivations? I often find that's good to check in on multiple times a year because your top five motivations may well change. Usually your kind of why overall stays pretty similar. I don't know whether it's like living a life that is financially free or whatever it might be.

6:49Like a lot of the time they are pretty consistent, but I do think it's quite important to acknowledge whether your goals have stayed the same or changed in terms of that way, like your motivations. Then the second thing that is really important to talk about here, which we also talked about in January and talking about setting goals for 2024 is what do I wish I had more time to do? Because I think by asking yourself, what do I wish I had more time to do? You're actually asking myself, what have I not been prioritizing? Because ultimately, as horrible as it sounds, anything you're not spending time doing, you are not prioritizing.

7:20And you don't need to prioritize everything. Like, I know that's horrible to hear when you're saying, I haven't been spending time doing exercise, and you haven't been prioritizing it. And you've been like, I haven't had time. That's absolutely fine. Your priorities have been other things. I'm not saying that's wrong. You may have four priorities that are completely unmovable in terms of dependence in terms of financial needs whatever it might be but actually knowing where you've been prioritizing time whether it is a non-negotiable for your life and livelihood or not is incredibly important in order to be able to kind of look at whether you want to change any of that if you can change any of that and don't get me wrong different people will have different amounts they can change especially when it comes to dependence children children caring any of these things but it is really worth bearing in mind and I think that actually asking myself this question usually gets me into quite a clear headspace in terms of like okay I might be reaching all of my goals but actually I'm spending no time with my friends or I'm spending no time on my own or I'm spending no time working if all of your goals are not to do with work it's just a really useful check-in so step two on this is talking about your quarterly and monthly goals.

8:28So I take a look at this check-in and then I go back to my yearly goals and I use this to come up with my goals for the next month or quarter. And the reason we're going to do this is because you might be looking at this now and this kind of plan with me episode and going like, we did that in January. Yeah, sure. We did that in January. It's not January now. And I think that is the most important thing that like we allow ourselves to let slip because we allow ourselves to see one time a year of the time that we're recentering. My motivations change within the month sometimes, like they shouldn't, but like sometimes they do and like things change and goals change and careers change.

9:03And so you need to be setting goals for not just the whole year. You need to be breaking down essentially how that looks therefore for the next quarter and the next month. So as we spoke about in the original planning episode, these goals, these monthly and quarterly goals need to be achievable and trackable. So make sure you consider how you're feeling, the capacity you have and how you're going to measure your success. So in terms of what goals to set, you might want to break down your goals from your year. You might want to take a little bit smaller. You might want to take a little bit bigger.

9:37It's totally up to you and how big this next quarter is for you or you want it to be for you. You might have just had a really successful quarter and like done amazingly since 2024 and you want to go harder and you want to replicate that, absolutely fine. You might want to take it a little bit smaller because you bit off more than you could chew. So first of all, if you have the planners, you actually just need to go to the beginning of the planner and you can just fill this in. It's written out so you can just fill in like the one, two and three, but I'll read it out in case you don't have the planners.

10:01So in terms of areas to set goals, I would generally do it around personal development, career and education, finances, relationships. And then I would also, if you have like a specific interest in health and fitness for example physical progress performance progress mental kind of well-being health and nutrition you can pick and choose you don't need three goals for all of these you do need to make sure that the goals you do have are specific and are measurable so that you can achieve success because remember what do we say you cannot achieve success if you do not define success so I spend some time setting those goals generally they are taken from my annual goals and they are broken down into more bite-sized like what could I do in the next few months once I've set these goals I take five minutes to note down the steps I need to reach them or a little bit of a brainstorm sometimes I do this in mind map format in terms of how I think I'm going to get there so for example if your monthly goal is to pitch to three people about an upcoming project I'd note down that I need to have an ideation session I need to build out the pitch docs I need to set up presentation meetings I need to like all of the different areas from outreach all the way to actually getting things booked in then you need to make these goals into actions rather than just like plucking them out of thin air so if there is anything that when you look at each of these goals and you're thinking like how am I going to get there I would even go so far as putting it in your calendar like if you have a goal that you need to reach by a certain amount of time like this pitching goal for example put into your calendar how that needs to look over the next three months does that mean that by the end of this month you need to have outreach to people?

11:35If so, put it in your calendar because then you're going to start keeping yourself accountable over a timeline as well, not just when you get like the planning itch because you watched a TikTok about planning and then you got excited. You owe yourself more than that. So baby steps are very much the way to reach those big goals. And if you want to read more on this, I've added a reading list in the show notes and would hugely recommend Atomic Habits by James clear this is all around the theory that one percent better every day a kind of accumulation of good habits is actually what leads to bigger lifestyle change rather than any big changes at all which is great news for us in terms of not needing to do anything big but news for us in the way that we actually need to stick to things to actually make any change then I make sure I translate these monthly goals into weekly goals as I said I'd even go as far as putting them in your diary weekly goals are always the first ones that drop for me as I get in on Monday and then get straight to work rather than taking the time to goal set which I find is incredibly important you can have some time to touch base every week but personally I find the more I can do at the beginning of a month or a quarter the better in terms of keeping me on track when I go straight into my week and or straight into my month and I haven't spent any time touching base with actually like what success looks like for me that month or how I'm going to tie it into my annual goals or quarterly goals there is a direct correlation between that and the times that I do not reach my monthly goals.

12:58That is why even in the daily planners, I have never got rid of the beginning of this, which has the yearly goals, the quarterly goals, the monthly goals. It is so important because busyness does not equal productivity and productivity even doesn't equal effectiveness, which is doing the right thing in the right direction. You cannot just feel busy and then think that you're reaching all of your goals. It just doesn't work like that. Sometimes there will be a correlation but that won't always be the case. I think it is so incredibly important to keep doing those weekly check-ins, those monthly check-ins and getting them into your week and that is why we have three non-negotiables every day as well.

13:34I don't care if you're using the planners or not actually doing these things and making sure each day or each week you are setting out these goals and then each day you are doing three non-negotiable things that actually get you closer to that goal. Step three is habit tracking. We've kind of alluded to this already but as I always do I then break these kind of monthly, quarterly goals down into habits and I add them to my habit tracker. So, for example, if my weekly goal is to drink more water, the habit I track is having six glasses of water a day. This can be many other things. This is going to be about whacking out, but it can be about so much more.

14:05It can be about outreaching to six potential clients per day, whatever it might be. I think it's so easy to hear all of this and to think like, that's a lot. Realistically, I'm taking time to explain this because I want it to make sense. But let me tell you, like, none of this takes more than half an hour, like half an hour a month. That is less time than you spend scrolling on TikTok in the evenings by probably a long way. You have to get it out of your mind that this like goal setting, blah, blah, blah, takes a long time. It doesn't. What takes longer is reaching your goals a roundabout way when you could have just reached them in a more linear way.

14:45don't get me wrong nothing's going to be linear but it can be a lot more linear and you can learn things a lot quicker and you can learn what aren't your goals a lot quicker and so I would just say that like you have to get it out of your head that like the goal setting stuff is just like wishy washy journaling like all of this kind of you know the the things that feel a little bit too self-cary rather than productivity these things are so so so important and there is a reason why big businesses set their goals like this and that's not to say that big businesses do everything right but big businesses do need to basically make things happen like they need to make things happen out of thin air and they need to make that be the reality for them and their shareholder that's what you need to do for your life like you are the sole shareholder of your life you're the only person that's going to make that happen you're the only person that's it's going to affect if you don't make that happen and I just think that like I can hear myself like when I'm talking about it and it being like oh is this too much no it's not fucking too much it's going to take you half an hour a month.

15:42Like get over it. That is like, there's so much that this can actually help you do. And whether you use this method or other methods, just like you need to be effectively goal setting in order to be able to progress in the way you want to.

16:11contracts. Just the right expert, right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. When you think of skyrocketing brands like Aloe, Allbirds, or Skims, it's easy to credit their success to great products, sleek branding, and brilliant marketing. But here's the overlooked secret. The real magic lies in the engine behind the scenes. the business powering their business. For millions of brands, that engine is Shopify, making selling seamless for them and shopping effortless for us.

16:51Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Aloe Yoga uses. Sign up for your$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash retail, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash retail to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash retail. You're invited to spend an evening on Fremont Avenue. For generations, this house has been home to soulful music, good food, and cutthroat card games, saints and sinners, unexpected laughs and unspoken truths, good times, hard times, and of course, family. Always family. So pull up a chair and join us at Fremont Avenue, a world premiere play only at Arena Stage.

17:32Performances start October 8th. Tickets at arenastage.org.

17:40so i wanted to have a little bonus within this episode around communicating your goals to your team i think this comes in a few different formats and i'm like well aware that not everyone runs a team okay so this isn't just supposed to be for that i do want to go into it because you know not all content needs to be for everyone but i think as part of this as well it doesn't just need to be your team like if you have clear goals and you are in a relationship like you live with someone for example and those goals come around like they're around finances or they're around buying a house or like whatever it might be that is your team like spend some time checking in and communicating goals to any other stakeholders in like your life or any other of the things that kind of that affect this like when I sat down and wrote my 2024 goals a lot of my goals in like friendship revolved around doing more things that I wanted to do so things like going to more live music things like that requires other people to get involved so while I didn't call everyone into a meeting to actually do that literally sending things out to people and being like hey I want to go to these three things like who's in or you know spending some time talking to like my fiance about like okay well if this is our goal by the end of the year or like this is my goal like how do you feel about that do you feel like financially we're going to be able to get there whatever it might be that is your team as well but I'm going to be talking about like specific teams at the moment because I do think this is really important.

19:03If you have professional goals, if you work with a team or have anyone that you manage, you are going to need for people to be aligned with this and you need to be able to communicate this effectively. But I think there are some specific rules to follow when you're setting goals for a group rather than as an individual, which is why I really wanted to talk about this here, because it's easy to overwhelm your team or the people around you, the people you're basically on this journey with, with tons of wishes but it is not a goal without a plan. Isn't that a cute quote? So firstly when you're reflecting I'd actually recommend getting the perspectives of your team on how they found the last three months.

19:36If you're leading a team you have to know about the other people in the team so have they reached their personal goals? How have they contributed to reaching their professional goals? This means you're not setting goals which are completely out of sync with where they are and where therefore you are as a team even if it's just one part of your team and it's also useful to get an understanding of how they're finding their work and their jobs because you need to know if they feel completely flat out nearly burnt out when you're saying I want to double the amount we're doing this month. Next up when you're writing team goals you need to be thinking about who is going to be actioning them.

20:10So your goal might be to go live with a certain number of campaigns but if you haven't got the resource it's never going to be realistic. So when you set goals mentally assign them to individuals or groups and then if there's a gap between what you can do and what you want to do, you know you might need more resource for that period or you might need to let some goals take a back seat. That's fine, you're not setting yourself up for failure and not reaching your goals when they were never going to happen anyway because it wouldn't make sense with that resource. Lastly, when you're communicating these goals to your team, make sure that you emphasize the steps that will need to be taken to achieve these goals.

20:41You all need to be in it together. As a team, one of the most important things is that you are emphasizing teamwork and one of the best things you can ever do to elevate your own work is to get better work from your team so they need to be aware of what's expected of them what's realistic and what timelines they should be working towards then give them space and time to also ask questions it is categorically bad management to send a team a load of goals without any sort of inkling about how to get there so make sure you're sending them on a journey rather than kind of like firing wishes into the ether that also might not fully align with their personal goals or their professional goals.

21:20Like don't get me wrong, you need to be leading a team and you don't just need to know if like Susan particularly wants to advance in her career this month. She's got to with your team in mind, but it is worth just really being able to touch base and therefore being able to set things with that in mind. I am just going to quickly answer two dilemmas based on the kind of goal setting side. And I just wanted to address these because I felt like they could be quite representative of a lot of people. So hi Grace, I've been running my business for three years now. It's a pet food company but I'm so bad at setting goals I always overreach and then feel rubbish when I don't meet them how can I stop myself getting overexcited and setting unreachable goals so number one first thing you've got is self-awareness so that's a step in the right direction you've said it yourself like you set unrealistic goals you overreach and then you end up feeling rubbish recognition of that cycle is one of the most important things because spoiler alert if you're constantly setting goals and you're constantly not reaching them there are two things that are probably going wrong.

22:15You're either setting way too big goals or you're doing no work. Like it's one of those two things. That's nothing to be offended at. It's like, it's one of those two things. You might be doing all of the work in the world and it can still be unrealistic. So the most important thing there is the fact that you have recognised that that is what you are doing. And therefore, why not spend this quarter setting goals that are like painfully realistic, just to realign yourself, set them that are so realistic that you know that you're going to reach them because ultimately when a business sets a forecast they're not looking at it and being like what could we do let's take that up by two times that's will happen for some scale-up businesses but like that's very rare forecasts aka goals are based off what you think you can do and so you need to reframe it away from like the idea of a goal being this kind of completely shot in the dark type thing to a goal being almost like a plan take it back for one quarter or one month show yourself that you can do it and then go 20 % higher 20 % higher it doesn't need to be like a goal doesn't need to be a whole change in your life the next dilemma is hello grace every single year I set a fitness goal and every single year I give up on it.

23:32My goal for January was to run three times a week and I've already crashed and burnt. How do you find the motivation to stick to your goals? We all know by this time that motivation means absolutely nothing. Motivation is like almost not a thing. It's like a spark that you'll get occasionally. Motivation will get you nowhere. It is discipline that will get you somewhere. That's all I can tell you. No one achieves great things off motivation. Don't get me wrong. It's great to have passion for things. It's great to have motivation for things but like no one is motivated when they get up at like 6am and have to do something that they don't want to do that's discipline that's habits you've said it yourself you usually set goals again that you crash and burn on and I want you to reframe the idea of crashing and burning first of all I think that it is incredibly important that you start thinking of it as being a little bit more realistic and also about just taking it slower like say your goal is to run three times a week.

24:28If someone's goal is to make£10 ,000 more a year, for example, you don't need to do that on week one. I think what you need to bear in mind is you clearly get a excitement based off setting goals that have an opportunity to be reached and you get excited about that prospect. And actually what you need to start doing is you need to start slower because clearly for you the excitement is off that rush at the beginning and actually you need to take away that rush because otherwise you're basically giving yourself just like a dopamine hit based off the idea of the goals and then doing them for one or two weeks.

25:04So try and remove the crash and burn mentality. You haven't crashed and burnt, you've learned one way that doesn't work. Reframe it, I would say set a goal that you know you can do and the reason you know you can do it is because you're going to be disciplined about it. Go for one run a week, go for one run every other week. Whatever it might be, start that now and once you start proving to yourself that you can do that you can take it up it going slower and I think what a lot of people think and what I definitely think as well is like okay but that's slower than I wanted do you know what's even slower is crashing and burning so actually what you need to be able to do is you need to be able to take it back a step not allow yourself to have the excitement of like a sprint and starting something new that changes your whole life instead only allowing yourself to have that three runs a week once you've got to a point where you've basically proved to yourself that that's a good thing for your life and it's not too far and therefore going to make you crash and burn when realistically what you want to do is you want to end up running more overall and therefore you need to start slower so thank you so much for listening to this episode of working hard hardly working i hope it is giving you some goal setting and excitement which is not just for january i think that we all love to talk about atomic habits and we all like to talk about habits theory and how like one percent better every day but one percent better every day means only one percent better on the first of january and also one percent better on like a random day in march so i would say that like the more you can get this into your ethos in terms of how much you do this year like it should be fun it should be fun checking back in with yourself and working out like where you're going next what you haven't quite done right what that means for you etc etc etc so anyway that's enough of my pet talks for the day let me know what other solo episodes you'd like to hear one thing we thought it'd be fun to add is I always get questions after these episodes asking for kind of I don't know asking about a specific thing we've talked about or more information or like reading recommendations or whatever it might be and like we all know that my big passion in life is books so I'm glad we can share that or I can just like share it with you and you can just not use it at all if you don't want it so I've added a reading list to this episode description where you can find recommendations on the subjects of productivity and goal setting.

27:20If you're listening on Spotify, I've also left a few questions there that you can answer so we can share our planning wisdom. And I will see you next week.

27:40When you think of skyrocketing brands like Aloe, Allbirds or Skims, it's easy to credit their success to great products, sleek branding, and brilliant marketing. But here's the overlooked secret. The real magic lies in the engine behind the scenes, the business powering their business. For millions of brands, that engine is Shopify, making selling seamless for them and shopping effortless for us. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Aloe Yoga uses. Sign up for your$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash retail, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash retail to upgrade your selling today.

28:20Shopify.com slash retail.