It’s July ! Which means we are in quarter 3 and half way through 2021!
I’m not sure how your year started out but it’s not finished yet. I had a slow start with kids isolating, homeschooling, and moving out of London to our dream home.
I feel like I only really started actively working on my goals in May.
Well, where ever we are, now’s a good time as any to relook at our goals for the year, or even set some.
Why set quarterly goals?
I’ve always been one for setting goals or rather ‘New Year Resolutions.
I’ve done it since I was a teenager, I always had a project or an outcome I was working to.
The thing back then with my resolutions is that they weren’t tied to a deadline and I didn’t know about how to make them into easy to action steps.
Somewhere along the journey I learned about S.M.A.R.T goals
This really helped flesh out my dreams into actionable goals.
However I’d find that I set up a lot of goals to work on over the year but some goals didn’t need a year and others needed longer.
I’d lose momentum or motivation when the goa, would seem to drag out.
I came across this book “The 12 week year” and found it really impactful.
The basic premise is that a year is too long a time frame to work on goals and we are better off setting quarterly goals.
The benefits of this being:
- A build up of momentum as we are working in shorter spurts
- Achieve more as we work to a shorter time frame
- Our goals are likely to be more realistic (to the time frame)
- Get to create small wins each quarter that builds confidence
- We laser focus on what’s important and let go of the fluff/extras
If you would like to set some quarterly goals download these free printable dashboard/cover and sheet to put down your top 3 goals for this quarter.
how to set your top 3 quarterly goals
Grab your favourite planner, notebook or use my planner or printables.
Look at the vision you set for your year, if you havent got one take 15-30 minutes to think about where you’d like to be at the end of the year.
What sort of person would you like to be?
What is important to you, what are your values? How can you live those out?
What would you like to learn, or experience?
What are the things you’d like to have?
After doing this, consider what you can achieve in 3 months that fit into your goal for the year.
Use these prompts below to figure out what is the most important thing to you at this moment.
- How can you break down your annual goal into smaller projects that you can complete in a quarter?
- What feels the most important to you now?
- What goal is going to take a longer time, therefore you need to start working on it now to be able to achieve it by the end of the year?
- Is this goal what YOU really want, or is it something you think you SHOULD want?
- Use this question from the One Thing by Gary Keller to find focus – Which one goal would make the other goals unnecessary or easier?
Use your responses to guide you in choosing 2 goals for this quarter. Pick up 3 only because you’ll be able to get more done with your focus less spread out.
Multi-tasking or multi projects can be really hard to work on and most of us struggle to make meaningful progress when we are spread thinly across a ton of goals.
You can use my free printable above to keep your top 3 goals, keep referring back to them. Each month and week, make sure the action you are taking leads back into these quarterly goals.
Do that and I’m sure you’ll be that much closer to achieving them!
Share your goals with me, tag me on social media at @itstartswiththedream
If you would love to get accountability with crafting your dreams and want to live a version of your dream life today then join us in the membership!
