Why Small Goals Reap Big Rewards

When you find yourself procrastinating over a goal you want to accomplish, chances are you’re looking at it as one big whole. Seeing your goal accomplished and relishing the benefits it will bring you is a great way to remember why you want it. But when it comes to putting yourself into motion, you’ll get further faster by spreading the steps between you and your goal’s accomplishment over time.

The best investment of time you can make is to create a detailed list of the steps you think it will take to achieve your goal. Here's the plan: Keep breaking the steps down until you arrive at a series of the simplest possible actions that can be done in the smallest blocks of time. Then, working from your master list, plug six things you think you can do tomorrow into your daily planner or do-list. If six is too many, do two or three. Add more if you think you can do them without strain. You’ll find the right balance for yourself quickly. Just keep doing something every day from your list. If you don’t completely finish it, continue with it the next day. But every day, do as many steps as you can without it seeming stressful. Make it a game and enjoy ticking off each item your complete.

Following this simple plan will produce big payoffs for you. Because each of the steps is relatively simple and doesn’t consume much time, you’re more likely to take action. Procrastination falls by the wayside when all you have to do is invest a small block of time on a relatively easy task.

The internal reward of crossing steps off your master list is amazingly great. After only a couple days of following this plan, you will find that you feel compelled to do the last item or two that you wrote down as the day’s target tasks just so you can get the boost from crossing it off your list. Your confidence in your ability to keep commitments to yourself grows and you find yourself feeling an empowering sense of satisfaction over your daily progress and your competence in following your plan.

Your momentum will continue to build on a daily basis, too, as the number of items you cross off starts to catch up with the number of items left to do. You begin to see how following your plan is actually moving you nearer and nearer your goal. You find that you’re far less distracted by diversions that don’t serve your goal, that your goal has become a dominant focus for you.

As you move more deeply into action, you may find yourself adding some steps to your master list and deleting others. Action always produces more information and you’ll see what remains to be done with increasing clarity as you go along. You may need to acquire more knowledge about some phase of your goal, or you may discover a huge shortcut you hadn’t foreseen. Your master list will take on a life of its own, and will become an ever truer guide.

Day by day, your experience will increasingly prove to you that it’s not only possible, but probable—and eventually, inevitable—that you will reach your goal. What a freeing feeling that is! And it all begins with taking the time to list the littlest steps. So grab a great dream and get started with it today.

By: Susan K. Minarik

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