TL;DR:

• Setting goals and using journals may seem daunting at first.
• By establishing this routine with your goals, you can make adjustments and celebrate your successes along the way.

The saying goes knowledge is power, but it’s really only potential until it’s applied. To discover your potential, you’ll have to change how you think about and set your goals. 

New year’s resolutions don’t work because motivation doesn’t last. 90 days or 13 weeks is when you’ll start to see a real decline in your motivation towards a goal (Job, 2019).

I miss my goals more than I hit them. At the same time, it’s through failure that I find success. Click To Tweet

Since 2017, I’ve been using Best Self 90 Days & 6-month journals to keep me aligned with my ambitions. Routines and habit tracking might sound boring or daunting, but it works so well! 

Naturally, I’m a person that likes to fly by the wind. The primary reason I want to know the rules is so I’m aware of when I break them. 

To organize my thoughts, I started to keep a journal, all of the overwhelming, anxious thoughts that came to mind would stay on paper after I wrote them down. Over time journaling turned into planning. 

Success Is a Roadmap 

If we are being honest, nobody likes to plan! It’s tedious. It’s annoying, and we end up going in a different direction in a couple of weeks anyway, so why start? A few things: 

• Think about documentation first. These are your memoirs, your trials, and tribulations, the memories of your growth from start to finish. A big reason why I journal and plan is that when my grandkids ask about me I want them to have a library of artifacts they can visit. I’m documenting for my family. 
• Most people don’t define success. How many times have you gone through a day doing a bunch of things and then finishing the day feeling like you didn’t win? When you write your quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals down, there’s a target to hit, and you can be rational about your productivity over time. 
• Success leaves clues. When you are writing down what you do, you’ll become more aware of what kind of routines lead to a successful day. 

Planning isn’t about being perfect. I’ve been setting 90-day goals consistently for more than 5 years. And I miss my goals more than I hit them. At the same time, it’s through failure that I find success. 

During a 13-week (90-day) goal, I lose focus around weeks 6-7. So during these weeks, I take a break, reflect on the first half of my goal, and make adjustments to reenergize me for the remaining weeks. 

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5 Steps to 90-Day Goal Setting 

Setting 90-day goals doesn’t require anything but intention, a journal, and a pen. Here’s how to get started. 

1. The big picture: Select your big 90 goal(s) and be specific about why it’s important to you. 
2. Set progress milestones each month that is leading to progress toward your big goal.
3. Write down what actions and tasks you’ll need to complete to achieve each milestone. 
4. Weekly road map: pick a day each week to loosely map out your schedule. 
5. Update your schedule daily: I like to stick to 3 key actions I want to complete in a day. 

If 90-day goals feel like too much right now check out this blog 10 Daily Planning Techniques That Help You Work Smarter And Save Yourself Hours.

Setting 90-day goals helped me increase my productivity 4x; projects that seem like they’ll take forever actually take hours when they are mapped out. 

Download our 90-day goal-setting workbook at seleducators.com

And if you want to shop at best self use the code GAMMAGE for 15% off your order  https://bestself.co/

References

Job, K. (2019, December 2). How I use my bullet journal to set (and achieve) 90 day goals! Sublime Reflection. Retrieved October 11, 2022, from https://sublimereflection.com/set-90-day-goals/