5 Strategies to Rescue Resolutions

Too many times we see and hear people making New Year's Resolutions and by June they are in disarray, compromised, and abandoned. I don’t want anyone to feel guilty over it but I do want to give you ideas on how to get on track to systematically set and achieve new goals for 2011!

1. A book I recently shared with Kimmy Everett is Dan Kennedy’s “No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs.” It's a great one for “time-blocking” strategies and instructions and Dan is extremely blunt and to the point. One of the big reasons resolutions never become reality is no room is made for them in our daily schedules! For example, if your day is already full, and you resolve to get in a ½ hour jog every day, that ½ hour has to come from somewhere. You have to find something or several things that currently consume time that you can take 5, 10, 30 minutes from.

2. You can’t be real serious about a resolution unless you invest in and gather the required resources to make it happen. Almost anything you decide to do, any change you decide to make, any goal you set out to achieve requires new or different resources. That may be new work out clothes, different food in the cupboard or a private work place outside the office. Another cool thing is that sometimes investment motivates follow-through!

3. Chunk it down. If you’d like to go swim 2 miles, how about starting with 1/8th of a mile for 2 weeks, then ¼ of a mile for a few weeks, etc – build up to your goal.

4. Schedule shouldn’t govern priorities – priorities should govern your schedule. Go to pages 69-74 and 103-111 in Dan’s Time Management book where he talks about the mistake made by the vast majority of business owners and entrepreneurs – they operate like workers instead of bosses and leaders. They report to a workplace, then they let people and events and interruptions come at them all day and take control of their day. You have to wrestle control away from others’ priorities and govern by your priorities.

5. Daily progress is key. Take the objective and break it all the way down to a time line and to-do list for each day all the way from now to fruition. We’ve created a lot of training material for the US market and now working on Hebrew for the Israel market. We’re chunking it down and making lists and time lines for each thing in order to get it done before our next visit.