What is your Mount Everest? Part 2

Last week we discovered what our BIG ROCK is—the No. 1 goal in our life. Now we’re going to break that big goal down into smaller, more manageable tasks so you can easily execute them.

Picture yourself walking down a path. If you knew it was one kilometre long, that would be a breeze in your mind. But if you pictured a path 100 kilometres long ahead of you, that might seem insurmountable. One hundred kilometres isn't easy, unless you break it down into smaller steps. We’re going to concentrate on walking the steps in front of us by breaking down our yearly goal into a quarterly goal, a weekly goal, a daily goal, even to what we do each hour.

The first thing to do is set a reminder in your calendar on the first day of each quarter. That reminder should be set up to arrive as an email straight to your inbox. Look at your BIG ROCK goal (it should be pinned above your computer screen!) and ask yourself "What’s the first step you need to take to accomplish this goal?" Don’t worry about the second, third or fourth step. If you only accomplish one important thing in the next 90 days, what would it be? That’s your first quarterly goal. Write it down and pin it somewhere you will see it everyday. Then take that goal and break it down into weekly subtasks and write them down too. I recommend using a calendar such as this one. Writing these tasks on a calendar keeps you on track and holds you accountable to the tasks at hand.

Set a reminder on your calendar every Monday morning to set your goals for the week. Schedule the weekly subtasks as blocks of time on your calendar. Don’t even think about the big yearly goal; focus on the weekly subtasks that you have created from your quarterly goal—the one thing that you would accomplish if all else failed.

Next week I’ll share with you how to set daily goals and a couple of tricks for staying on top of the task at hand.