The Biggest Secret to Planning Your Goal
The biggest kept secret to planning goals is to plan with the end in mind; reverse engineer your goal!
What is reverse engineering?
When you reverse engineer a goal, you decide on what you want to accomplish when you finish your goal, then you plan backwards.
Let's say you decide you want to organize your whole house by the end of the year. You have four months until the year is over and 12 rooms in your house including the kitchen, living room, and garage. Some of these rooms are much larger than others and take much more time.
To reverse engineer your goal, you look at the data. You have four months which is 12 weeks.
You then decide approximately how much time you think each room will take to organize. Give yourself more time than you originally think, as a mom, things come up.
You will also decide how much time each week or day you want to spend organizing. This is where it may get a little tricky in that you may realize that you have way more work to do than you want to put time into. This is OK. This is good to realize now in the planning stage than later on when you realize you won't finish your goal when you originally planned because you ran out of time.
From here, you may have decided that you want to spend 30 minutes a day working on the easier rooms and once a month you will spend most of Saturday organizing the larger rooms.
The last step to reverse engineering your goal, is to write out your plan. Get out your calendar in your Anchor Planner and mark up those month pages! Decide which room you will clean on which day. With this plan you are able to see what you want to accomplish and when you are going to accomplish it. This is the magic of reverse engineering. All the guess work and wondering which room to clean and when, is gone! We know when and how we are going to accomplish our goal. This relieves so much stress and tension that comes from guessing and not having a plan. It truly is magic!
So I ask you, what goal are you working on right now? Have you reverse engineered it?