Articles about psychology
Setting goals

How to set goals
The secret of getting ahead
is getting started.
The secret of getting started
is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks
into small manageable tasks,
and then starting
on the first one.
- Mark Twain
It is a paradoxical
but profoundly true and important
principle of life
that the most likely way
to reach a goal
is to be aiming
not at that goal itself
but at some more ambitious goal
beyond it.
- Arnold Toynbee

It's not enough to have vague or general goals. You need to set powerful goals in order to get things done. Here's how:

Write them down. Brainstorm your goals, writing them down as you go, and then place them in an identifiable sequence - either by date, importance, expectations, or easy-to-hard.

Be specific. Don't talk about "improving the amount of time that you will study Torah every day." Stipulate the number of hours that you will commit yourself to study every Sunday, every Monday, and so on. Better yet - specify from-to times on the clock.

Write down your target date. When will you complete the job? Put it into your appointment book or on your wall candle.

Set a deadline for each step. You don't need to use fancy project management software in order to set smaller goals that lead to bigger ones. However, you do have to take out the time to set those smaller goals.

Break up the job into doable steps.

Will those goals preempt other goals? If so, be sure to re-schedule both sets of goals, so that everything gets done in a practical way and in a practical amount of time, and so that all of your needs are handled on time.

Where do you want to go now?

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Keywords: Goals, Method
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