Setting Personal Goals

I recently finished reading (listening to) Automatic Wealth by Michael Masterson. He suggests four main investment buckets to generate wealth: growth of income from your job, real estate (flipping houses and owning rentals), business ownership, and stocks as a distant forth. In addition to providing specific guidance on accomplishing these, he spends a significant amount of time discussing what being wealthy really means and why gaining wealth is a means to an end and not an end in itself.

The end, according to Masterson, is really having a fulfilled balanced life that spans your health, wealth, relationships, and personal growth goals. To that end, he devotes several pages to helping you set long-terms goals and then break those goals down to annual, monthly, weekly, and daily tasks that will be necessary to reach those goals. This technique is actually followed by several large organizations where the 5-yr plan is broken down into sizeable chunks of work for each individual in the organization – thus one can have a clear view of how their daily efforts contribute to the whole.

I decided to try this out and so far it has worked quite well. Not only does it help me prioritize my day, it also allows me to remain at ease each day knowing that I have not left things to chance if I do the tasks I have outlined diligently. I don’t feel like I am missing out on things because everything I do will lead to accomplishing my goals.

Like any new endeavor, I start by opening Excel. So I have created an Excel sheet to track my 2-3 yr goals, annual goals, and monthly, weekly, and daily tasks and the logic flows perfectly. I have broken down my goals into Wealth, Health, Relations, and Personal Growth and set specific parameters against each goal. I then identified specific targets against each parameter and from then on it was a matter of identifying the shorter-term targets and developing tasks needed to achieve the targets.

In all, it took about 2 hours to fill in the sheets (I created a separate sheet for monthly, weekly, and daily targets/tasks) and about 10 minutes a day to review the daily tasks and update them for the next day. At the end of the week, I updated the weekly tasks for the following week which takes about 15-20 minutes.

I have found this routine extremely valuable and suggest you give this a try for yourself. One thing I wanted to avoid was trying to do too much – so I occasionally removed or re-evaluated the tasks/goal as a way to prioritize the goals that I really wanted to achieve. For example, one of my personal growth goals is to be well informed about worldly matters. For this, my parameter was to read news from a different country once a week. I found that I could not get to this task and so I evaluated whether this was critical or whether another goal of travel to new areas in the world was a way to achieve the same goal of being well informed about worldly matters. For now, I took the leap that it was and dropped the task of reading worldly news off my list. I may add it back at a later date when I become more efficient at completing my other tasks. On average, I end up having about 10 tasks to be completed every day – each stemming from the four categories of broad goals that I have established for myself.

ps. One of my goals is to write about a new tool/tip/product/site per week - this blog is a result of that goal