How to Set Your Daily Goals Up For Success

To reach your long-term goals, you must lower your short-term expectations.

I struggled with two major problems when it came to the completion of my daily tasks:

1. Misjudgment of how long a specific task will take
2. Utter restlessness (read: distraction, procrastination, spending time in the dark playground called the internet, reading tremendous amounts about how to get more done, etc.)

The two reinforce each other and over an extended period, the results are disheartening. The thing is, when you’re a beginning entrepreneur, Hofstadter’s law and Optimism bias apply:

While you have no idea how long specific tasks will take, you are prone to believe that you’ll see more positive results than others from your efforts.

Publish a 500 word-article? Shouldn’t take more than 90 minutes, right?

Wrong. An hour has passed and you’re still stuck with the headline. You will also need images. Optimize the thing for search engines. Format it in Wordpress.

Instead of 90 minutes, half of the day is gone. You’re already way behind your schedule, and you’d also planned to do some freelance work today and meet some friends later.

The waves crash above your head and as the weeks go by, you seriously start to doubt whether being your own boss is worth the trauma.

The Consequences of Setting Ill-Conceived Daily Goals

When I started out building my own business, I had goals. Lots of them. Big goals, small goals, mid-term goals, and daily mini-goals.

I have always defined my goals as the concrete results I want to achieve:

• I want to become self-sustaining with my online business (long-term).
• By the end of the year, I want to make $1,000 from writing and $400 from freelancing (mid-term).
• Today I want to write an article and pitch 3 freelance clients (daily mini-goals).

Don’t get me wrong — quantifiable goals like these are not only great but necessary for intermediate- and long-term success.

However, in the form of daily mini-goals (last example), they are terrible for your actual workday. Why? Because short-term (daily) goal-setting takes a tremendous amount of practice, experience, and self-discipline.

When you’re starting out, you have no idea how long things will take and are prone to underestimating the necessary amount of time needed to do something for the first or second time.

At the same time, you are driven by the probably very ambitious goals you’ve set yourself, want to progress as quickly as possible and overestimate your mental and physical capacities, working 12 hours today if necessary? No problem!

This is how you end up with way too many and way too ambitious mini-goals, only to see yourself fall behind constantly. This leads to a vicious cycle as you feel like you should constantly do more than you find yourself capable of.

Embracing Consistency Over Quick Wins

The transformation came to me when I decided to make writing a steady income source. Almost every piece of writing advice out there told me I need to publish every day or at least multiple times a week to gain momentum.

But I couldn’t do it. I’m a slow writer. To write and publish an article takes several hours or even days for me and I just didn’t have these hours in my day due to my other projects and obligations.

Goals like “publish every day for a month” or “publish 3 articles this week” were like lethal injections for my motivation in the end, as I constantly fell behind.

So I decided to loosen things up and go with only two absolute terms: My intermediate-term goal (make writing a steady income source of $300 per month) and my disposable time per day (1 hour).

I dedicated one hour to writing daily and didn’t care about the outcome of each day. If this hour was spent entirely on one sentence, then that’s what it was for the day. If I managed to write 500 words — great!

I decided to spend one hour every day on writing (which included finding pictures, pitching publications and finding topics to write about). That was all that mattered, as a first step.

A month later I earned my first $500 from a paying publication. It was for an article I wrote and edited over a week, spending one hour each day.

Outcome-Orientation Vs. Process-Orientation

In the end, there are two ways you can approach your daily goals:

• In an outcome-oriented way
• In a process-oriented way

In the outcome-oriented approach, you define the exact outcomes you want to achieve and allocate an estimated time to them (e.g. write and publish a 500-word article in 90 minutes).

If that doesn’t happen, you’ve technically failed, based on your own standards. In a short time frame like a day, it’s very easy to fail if you are inexperienced.

In the process-oriented approach, you define the exact time you will spend with a task but don’t tie time and outcome together — once the time is over you move on to your next task for the day.

With this approach, you cannot fail in the short-term. Every day will be a success if you manage to consistently dedicate time to the things that matter to you, even if it’s just an hour.

Every day will be a success if you manage to consistently dedicate time to the things that matter to you.

This approach works for everything that isn’t tied to a strict deadline set by somebody else. There are only 3 main steps needed for it to work:

1. The night before, count the disposable hours available to you for the next day (deduct time spent with friends, sleeping, working out, etc.)
2. Based on your intermediate-term goals, decide what you need to spend time with
3. Spend exactly that time with each project/goal/task

The Holistic Benefits of Process-Orientation

Working towards your goals in a process-oriented way will not only redefine and ease your definition of success but will do wonders for your productivity, especially if you are a scattered person.

It’s hard to tell your brain to not get distracted before you reach your daily goals, especially when you can see already at noon that you won’t be able to follow through.

On the other hand, it’s very easy to tell your brain to focus for just one hour before getting scattered and thinking of new ideas for a few minutes.

“We will spend one hour on writing before we move forward with our online course and in-between I’ll allow you a 15-minute break to go crazy” is a great compromise you and your scattered mind can work with.

How You Can Start

To be able to work in a process-oriented way whenever I can has completely changed my business.

I’ve not only managed to make writing an additional income stream but have also devised and validated a new product idea, as well as beginning to offer consulting sessions. It genuinely helped me master the art of follow-through and helped me trust in the act of mere showing-up consistently.

If you feel process-orientation is something you want to try but don’t know how to approach, start with one thing you’ve been putting aside due to a lack of time. Dedicate 30 minutes or an hour a day to it, with no strings attached and no short-term expectations. Then see where this takes you.

Remember: Things are often exactly as hard as you make them for yourself. So be gentle, be lenient, lower your short-term expectations and trust the power of constant dedication in the long-term.

Mind Cafe in Your Inbox

Want to stay up to date with our top-performing posts each week? Sign up for email updates by following this link.