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Working towards goals consistently can feel like a thankless, sometimes endless process. While there is something to be said about the benefits of taking breaks and self-care, it's also important to maintain goals and put in the work to improve your life and achieve the tasks you set out for yourself. 

Our goal is to array the most commonly used methods and tips for becoming goal-oriented. If some of these don’t work for you, that’s okay. Don’t force yourself to obey a tip that doesn’t work. Experiment, find what you like, and go from there.

1. Set Firm Goals

The first thing to achieve your goals is to actually set them in the first place. Believe it or not, research suggests that as much as 80% of people don’t set goals. 

If you want to reach your goals, you need to make sure you have them first, and write them down! Writing down goals makes them concrete.

2. Keep a Planner

Writing goals down segues well into keeping a planner because you can write everything you do down in your planner! Keeping a planner helps you understand what you’re actually doing on a day-by-day or week-by-week basis. This big-picture organization helps you keep your goals and daily grinds in focus.

3. Practice Time Management

Alongside writing down what you’re doing, figure out the best way to manage your time and go about actually working towards your goals. Different time management techniques work for different people, but give some of the more popular ones a try, like Pomodoro.

These benefits of time management vary from person to person, but they will usually allow you to keep yourself focused without burning yourself out, and help maintain mindfulness.

4. Focus on Your Sleep

Sleep is arguably the single most important aspect of healthy living in general, and reaching your goals is no different; if you don’t sleep enough, or get good enough sleep, it will be hard to do the work you’re actually capable of doing. Sleep’s benefits are too numerous to list here, but good sleep basically improves every aspect of your life.

Sleep is the foundation of your health. Getting good sleep can ensure you have the best day possible from the get-go.

5. Keep Yourself Motivated

As silly as it may seem to some people, keeping yourself motivated and inspired is a great way to keep yourself in the game and working towards your goals. Motivation works in complicated ways to trick our brains into thinking we can keep going when we would normally get bored, distracted, or exhausted.

6. Break Big Goals Up Into Tasks

If you set out to write a novel, you don’t write it all in one sitting. You may work by scenes or maybe by chapters—these milestones are smaller, more manageable tasks. Treat all big goals like this. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, after all.

7. Organize Goals and Tasks By Importance

Alongside breaking up goals into tasks, and managing all of your goals, your list of tasks and goals may become daunting and actually seem more insurmountable than before. To that end, organize your goals and tasks in order of importance and prioritize them accordingly.

Consider your goals and tasks through two filters: importance and urgency. If something is urgent but unimportant, maybe rank it lower. If something is important but not urgent, it’s a prime candidate to be broken into smaller tasks and worked on over time. Considering these two traits can help you see what needs to be worked on immediately and what can wait.

8. Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

In our endless quest to be positive and maintain a positive attitude, we can sometimes fall into the trap of toxic positivity; whether it’s refusing to acknowledge failure or refusing to try and fail because we fear it, our refusal to feel anything other than positive can actually hurt us. 

Human emotions are complex and necessary. Sadness is just as healthy as happiness, in the proper dosages. The sting of failure is nothing to be afraid of; victory tastes that much sweeter after.

9. Learn From Failure

Alongside being unafraid of failure, you can also teach yourself to embrace it. Obviously, we’re not saying to seek failure out, but you can learn to see failure as an even greater opportunity than a victory because failure is a chance to learn from mistakes.

10. Build a Goal-Oriented Mindset

Finally, build a goal-oriented mindset. This will oftentimes naturally come from pursuing one or multiple of the previous tips. But if it doesn’t, or if you really want to focus on your mindset, start switching your brain to thinking about the end of your goals and what they will achieve, rather than fearing the work they will take.

If you want to start off your day right, pick up an inspirational mug from I Am One Mind’s digital store!