The world is filled with goal quitters who did not understand what a realistic goal timescale is. Often I meet people who tell me they are going to make a million pounds/dollars in a specific time scale. As a result of their un-realistic goal timescale, the goal quitters often over extend themselves financially and timewise.
In part five of our essential goal setting series, we are going to share with you how to create a realistic goal timescale. Before reading this article workbook, ensure you have read and taken the actions in the previous four parts of our goal setting workbook series.
| · In the essential guide to goal setting part one: Brain dump and type, we shared how to brain dump everything you wanted to achieve in your life.
· In the essential guide to goal setting part two: Long term goals, we shared how to prioritise and identify the one goal you must focus on. · In the essential guide to goal setting part three: Chunk down, we shared how to take your long term goal and break it down into achievable components. · In the essential guide to goal setting part four: Be specific, we shared how the subconscious mind is responsible for ensuring a goal is achieved and how to transform your general goal into a specific goal |
In part four of our essential goal setting guide, we shared with you how to transform your large goal into goal with two major components.
- Component one was how to be specific
- Component two was to create a realistic goal timescale
As we saw in the previous workbook article, the subconscious mind does the majority of the work in ensuring a goal is achieved. So to ensure the subconscious mind worked for you, it was vital for you to make the goal specific.
Your mind needs a timescale
In addition to having a specific goal, your subconscious mind needs a time scale to help you achieve that goal. You need to put an end date to achieve your goal by. This end date is important to focus your mind and the things you do day to day to reach your goal destination.
The reason why most people fail to achieve their goals is because there is no timescale. There are several ways to work out the time scale. In our workshop articles we’ve used the chunk down forward time scale method.
Think about how long it will take to do each small chunk of the large goal and you should have an insight into the average amount of time it will take for you to achieve your goal. We say average time, because your journey will be affected by both good luck, disasters, betrayals, friendly leg ups, motivational ups and downs and impatience which we’ll discuss in our part five of essential goal setting.
When you set a time to achieve the goal, it is best to have end dates. Rather than “within 6 months” or “within 3 years” or “in 12 months.“ I’ve not set a specific date to keep the articles youthful but an example of a specific date is by 25 June 2019.
Forward goal timescale creation
You can quickly work out the accuracy of your goal time scale by using the chunk down micro goals. We showed you how to create the micro goals in part three of the essential goal setting workbook article. To work out the time scale:
- Take every micro goal, and think how long it will take to achieve each one of those micro goals.
- Now add the time together.
The total amount of time to do all the actions within those micro goals is the total time it will take for you to achieve your goal. This is a simplistic method and makes the assumption that you have no other commitment than achieving your goal, and can spend 100% of your working time on your goals.
You will have to readjust the timescale depending on how much time you have available to achieve your goal. In other words,
- if you have a full time job, you will need to create a balance for you to do your full time job and move in the direction of your goal.
- if you are a single parent, you will need to spend some time with your child(ren) and so will need to re-adjust your goal timescale to fit around your parental responsibilities.
Reverse goal timescale creation
As we saw using the forward goal timescale creation method, the timescale, is relatively easy to work out using the time taken to achieve the smaller goals. However, what if you could not get the right information due to a lack of a specific intellectual goal. For example, many clients want to become financially free within a year. They choose a figure of one million pounds to earn in a year.
To help me work out whether this goal is feasible. I ask them the questions to determine how much time then wish to work for and what their current income streams are. The questions about amount of time include:-
- How many months in a year are you willing to work to achieve your goal?
- How many weeks in a month are you willing to work to achieve your goal?
- How many days in a week are you willing to work to achieve your goal?
- How many hours per day are you willing to work to achieve your goal?
- How many days holiday are essential to you?
The questions about income streams include:
- How much income per year does your job give you?
- How much income per year does your bank interest give you?
- How much income per year does your property investment bring?
- How much per year does your stocks and shares bring?
- How much per year does your business bring?
- What other income streams do you have?
Let’s look an the following diagram as an example.
You can quickly see in the above example that this person’s income will not bring them £1,000,000 in a year. So the next thing we need to do is to see how we can create a business that will bring them the amount they want. A good goal to create a business from scratch that will make you a million pounds is 5-7 years.
Here is an example you can create a business washing cars. If you charge £12.00 to wash a car and can wash 20 cars a day – this will bring you an income of:-
£12 x 20 cars = £240 per day
If you can hire five people and pay them £8 per car and you would keep £4 for managing the business you would earn.
£4 x 5 people x 20 cars = £400 per day
£400 x 6 days = £2,400 per week
£2,400 x 4 weeks = £9,600 per month
£9,600 x 10 months = £96,000 per year
I normally calculate on ten months for holidays and illness
If you have ten people washing cars for you, then you can potentially earn approximately £200,000 per year. In five years, you will have made your million pounds.
Now you can quickly see that you can create any business that offers a service to help you bring in larger sums of money to create wealth. At FiveYearsToFinancialFreedom.com, we always recommend you create that business around something that you are passionate about.
Our last example does quite give all the variables involved but we wanted to share with you a rough idea of how anyone can make a lot of money if they would learn good business skills and so quickly hit their goal of millionaire.
Action Points
Break down your goal using the forward planning method or the reverse method to create a realistic goal timescale for you to achieve your dream.
Until then live long and prosper, oh and don’t be lazy! Leave us a comment in the section below. We love to hear the tips and insights from our readers.
In the goal setting series so far:-
- Essential Guide to Goal Setting 1: Brain Dump and goal types
- Essential Guide to Goal Setting 2: Long term goals
- Essential Guide to Goal Setting 3: Chunking down
- Essential Guide to Goal Setting 4: Become Specific
- Five techniques to stay focussed
Other articles readers have enjoyed
- Never Give Up – A short story from my property journey
- Nine reasons why losing my job was awesome
- Why being busy is a waste of time
- How to create your perfect to do list
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