How many a times, you start your week with certain intention and goals, but by the middle of the week you realize that you are nowhere near meeting those goals. As a result, you start panicking. Your productivity plummets. You feel disappointed and like a failure.

Then, you either try to multitask your way the rest of the week to get the most done, or you end up giving up on your goals altogether!  The need to get so much done in less than enough time and fewer or next to none support structures stress us out!

Firstly, let’s try to understand why we struggle to meet our daily and weekly goals. Here are some of the factors that impact our productivity:  

The Unexpected

No matter how much we plan and no matter how hard we try, there are times, when the unexpected happens. There could be family or health emergencies, an unexpected meeting or an urgent project vying your attention, even bad weather derailing a travel plan. This is life! There are circumstances beyond our control that impact our plans negatively. We end up missing a deadline or losing the sight of a goal forever. Consequently, the failure of our plans leaves us frustrated with our productivity and disillusioned too about the effectiveness of planning.

Making Incorrect Estimation of Time

An important reason that prevents us from successfully reaching our goals is our incorrect estimation of time a task or a goal would take. We make an ideal estimate of the time required to do a certain thing. But since we function in a less than ideal environment, full of distraction and emergencies needing our attention, we end up needing more time than estimated to finish our tasks. This means that we would be able to accomplish less than what we intended or planned originally, or we need to delay our deadline.

Allowing Distractions to Get In the Way

The pressures and demands of our roles, responsibilities and everyday living do make the time available to us seem shorter. But the truth is that in a highly digitized world, the time available to us hasn’t shrunk. It’s us! Glued to our screens, we are more distracted than ever.

Overlooking Time Needed for Necessary Stuff

In our daily lives, we aren’t working 24/7! We also need time to cook, clean, eat, shower, rest, socialize and sleep. In our zeal to create a powerful and super effective plan, we end up packing it with tasks and goals up to the brim. As a result, we end up compromising on important aspects of our personal lives. This means that we end up cheating on rest, sleep, family time, etc, just to meet our deadlines. This impacts our work life balance and serious causes issues in our personal lives.

3 Steps to Take on Daily Basis to Meet Your Weekly Goals

The failure to meet our weekly goals lies in our inability to steer the course of our day and week. Here are some of the things we need to do on daily basis in order to meet our weekly targets and goals:  

Accept and Tackle the Unexpected Accordingly

The truth is that emergencies and the unexpected factors are an inevitable part of life. So, if we make allowances of these unexpected factors and emergencies in our original plans and goals, then we would be able to adjust, adapt and improvise ourselves and our routine. This way we would be able to meet some of the goals, if not all, despite encountering emergencies and unexpected circumstances.

Set a Realistic Timeline and Deadline

If we are able to set or negotiate a more realistic and less idealistic timeline and deadline for our goals and tasks, our chances of success would increase. Thus, try or negotiate your timelines and deadlines by keeping in mind your unique circumstances. Try to set or negotiate a broader timeline, flexible goals and deadlines for yourself, if you can, and try to work at a faster pace to achieve it. Remember, it’s always good to under commit and over deliver, rather than over commit and under deliver.   

Minimize Distractions

Distractions are all around us. While it’s not always possible to eliminate all the distractions in your life, you can take a proactive approach to minimize them. For instance, you cannot force your toddler to stop making noise, you can negotiate some time for yourself by making him/her busy in some engaging activity. You can also try to work when your kid is napping or at school. You can also put your own phone on silent or put it away while you are working in order to make the optimal and maximum use of the time available to you.

To Sum Up

Merely setting up goals and plans don’t guarantee success. This doesn’t mean that goal setting is a futile activity. Most of the time, we fail to meet our goals due to emergencies and unrealistic goal setting and planning. Thus, when we are setting our weekly or monthly goals, we need to be realistic not only in our planning but also be mindful about our unique circumstances. Likewise, we also need to counter the surrounding distractions, Conclusively, the ability to be intuitive, adaptable, responsive and focused towards our circumstances are factor that make our goals effective and make us successful.