Action-Based Numeric Goals That Get Results

I’m not usually one for goal setting but 2009 is really feeling like a new start so I want to push hard towards achieving my dreams. The trouble is, how to track the progress I’m making in a way that gets results? I’ve decided to use some action-based, numeric goals to help me do that.

The Trouble With Ordinary Goals / Resolutions

Resolutions are usually pretty final such as “I resolve to quit smoking” or “I resolve write a blog post every day” and they are easily broken which leads to disappointment. Traditional goals are usually based around some milestone to achieve such as “I want to earn $X a month with my online business” or “I want to lose X lbs in weight”. Sometimes deadlines are added.

I have really grown to dislike these kinds of goals because until that magic moment when you hit the target, you are constantly reminded that you aren’t there yet. Plus, the goal itself is useless – it does nothing to actually help you actually get the result.

The Missing Ingredient – ACTION

To achieve anything in life you need to take action. I always emphasise the importance of action in the courses that I write. Reading a book, studying a course, getting a degree – education and knowledge alone does nothing to help you achieve anything. You must put that knowledge into action.

Therefore, I much prefer to think of what you might call a traditional goal as the objective and then think about what action I can take to achieve it and then find a way to follow through. For example, I want to reach a full time income this year, which is around $5,000 a month, and I’m about a quarter of the way there right now. So I can brainstorm ways to make more money:

• Develop web-based software with a subscription fee
• Sell more copies of my paid courses
• Build blog traffic and get more advertising revenue

Now looking at these, are these actionable? Not quite – I would call them strategies. I still have to break them down and figure out HOW to actually implement those strategies. So for example for the second one, selling more copies of a paid product I could brainstorm actual ways to do this:

• Ask other marketers to promote it for me
• Setup an Ebay auction for the product
• Conduct a one-off Warrior Special Offer
• Experiment with PPC

Now we have some real actions that can be implemented. Similarly, looking at the third strategy for building blog traffic, we all want that don’t we? So again, I would look at HOW to get more. For me at the current stage the blog is at, my preferred traffic generation strategy is getting search engine traffic. I like to write posts on a subject that I know is being searched on and then drive backlinks to those posts to give them an extra boost in the search engines.

Continuous, Measurable Progress

Another problem with many traditional goals is that it’s really hard to tell if you’re making progress. For example, for my money goal I only do my accounts once per month and the amount I earn fluctuates quite a bit. I don’t often see direct evidence of the progress I’m making. My primary strategy this year will be developing software but throughout the entire development process, which could take several months, there will be no money earned and therefore if my goal focussed purely on the end result I would feel as though I wasn’t making any progress.

This has really been bugging me lately. I want to set goals so I feel as though I’m making progress but I want to be able to see visible progress every day that I work on them. Therefore I have setup a whole bunch of goals that are based on action and have a numeric component that allows me to make very clear and distinct measurements. Let me give you some examples.

Repeat X Action Daily For X Days

This is such a simple one but very powerful. I’ve used this with a health based goal to exercise every day that I’m at home for 100 days. At that point it should be a firmly ingrained habit. For blogging you might have variations such as:

• Write 10 good quality blog comments per day for 100 days
• Publish a blog post every weekday for 12 weeks

The trick to this type of goal is consistency. The idea is to repeat the action as often as required without skipping. If you miss a day,reset the counter back to zero and start over!

Do X Number of Different Actions

Sometimes you want to push yourself to think outside the box a bit, to brainstorm that little bit harder. This one is easier to explain with examples:

• Find 30 blogs in my niche to comment on
• Brainstorm 50 blog post ideas
• Find 100 places to get a backlink
• Brainstorm 10 ways to market my product

And so on. The idea here is to get your creative juices flowing. Pick a number that is a stretch. These types of goals don’t need a time limit but every time you add to the list you make measurable progress and hopefully by the end of it you have something solid that you can then act upon.

Repeat Action X Number of Times

Sometimes the work you need to do is a numbers game – the more you do, the better results you get. Here you just want to keep doing something over and over. You may or may not want to set a time limit for these.

• Work 500 hours in 100 days (this is one of my actual goals!)
• Sell 100 copies of Bloggers Bible (so is this!)
• Submit 50 articles to article directories
• Build 10 niche sites in 10 weeks

The first two here are my major work related goals. The first goal seems somewhat vague, just ‘work 500 hours’ but that’s because I know what work I need to do so as long as I do the work I make progress. My problem is that I think I’m working when I’m not. I’ll be at the computer most of the day and then realise I’ve got nothing done. I’ve started tracking my time using a utility called SlimTimer like I used to in the beginning so I can see exactly what I’m doing!

The second goal kind of breaks the rule a little bit because it’s not action based, it’s results based. However as long as that is combined with something actionable, it serves as a useful way of measuring progress.

Conclusion

If you know there’s something you want to achieve and you’re feeling a bit stuck, as if you’re not really making progress then perhaps you could adopt this style of goals. You could make them small at first. I’ve used 100 days for lots of mine but you could try just 30 days for example. Use whatever numbers work for you.

The other useful thing about these kinds of goals is that because they are numeric, it’s easy to track a whole bunch of them at once. Being the super-organised person that I am, I am tracking all of mine on a spreadsheet! Yes it’s a little anal but it means that each day I can tick a few boxes and feel the satisfaction of knowing that I’m progressing slowly and surely towards the milestones that I want to achieve.

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