Readtime: 3 Minutes

Happy New Year!

Most people (including myself) are charging headfirst into the new goals, ambitions and dreams we’ve cooked up for the year.

Now, we all know that the majority of people do NOT stay consistent after the first few weeks.

Changing habits and behavior is freaking difficult, so it’s not at all surprising that few people successfully do it.

Most people pin the blame on a lack of discipline, motivation or willpower.

But here’s the secret: failed goals aren’t usually caused by a lack of discipline, motivation or willpower, but rather a lack of clear action steps to take.

It’s just like building a Lego® set.

Image if the set didn’t come with the instruction manual? 

What if you had to figure out how to put it all together with just the picture on the box… wouldn’t it be WAY more difficult and take you waaaaay longer to try to build the set without the step-by-step instructions?

Yet, this is EXACTLY what happens when people set goals without breaking them down into clear, actionable steps.

A big goal, without clear action steps, is a recipe for overwhelm, procrastination and stagnation.

So, today I want to share a simple process + tool that I’m testing out this 1st quarter that will help you and me take more consistent action toward making 2024 a year full of growth, joy and fulfillment.

Break Your Goals Down Into Action Steps

Take your goal, and break it down into the actions that will lead you to it.

There are 3 steps here: (1) list out your goal, (2) identify the skills you’ll need to accomplish the goal, and (3) identify the actions to take to practice those skills.

Here’s an example of how I did this for one of my 2024 goals.

Goal: Sleep 7+ hours a night, five days out of the week.

Skills: Two skills that will help me achieve this goal are (1) calming down my mind in the evening (2) Arranging my room in a way that will help me go to sleep.

Actions: Some actions that will help me calm down my mind are (1) turning off my computer / stopping any mentally stimulating work at 9pm (2) don’t get on social media past 9pm.

Actions that will help me set up my room to be a calming, sleep inducing environment are (1) charge my phone outside my room at night (2) close the blackout curtains and dim the lights 15-20 mins before bedtime.

This short exercise helped me take a very general goal (getting more sleep) and identify exactly what I can do each day in order to make progress toward it.

Measure Your Progress

The only way to know if your plan is working is to measure your progress.

Measuring progress can be tricky, because with some goals (like losing weight) you won’t “see” any progress for quite some time. There may often be a time delay between when you start taking action and when you start seeing results. If you’re ONLY measuring how much of the result you have right now, you may quickly get discouraged and quit.

This is why I highly suggest you mainly measure action (how frequently you’re doing the things that create the results) rather than the results themselves. Because as long as you’re doing what it takes to generate results… the results will take care of themselves.

Nobody lost 10 pounds overnight.

Nobody became a millionaire overnight.

Nobody built a strong, deeply fulfilling relationship overnight.

But everyone that’s accomplished these things woke up each day and took action, regardless how much progress they could currently measure.

Here’s a tool I created to track my actions this year. 

You can download a copy for yourself here

Instructions for each line: fill in the action you want to take, the target number of times you want to do it each week, then check off each day of the month that you successfully do it.

You can use this data to adjust your plan month over month.

Cheers to an action-packed year!

See you next week.