How to Set Strong Short-Term Goals and Achieve Them Without Excuses

Goals give your life a sense of direction and purpose. Without goals, you may feel like a hamster in a wheel who gets very tired doing something but hardly ever achieves anything meaningful. If you can relate to this metaphor… well, you need more goals in your life.

Ideally, you need a healthy mix of short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals. In this post, we'll focus on short-term goals.

In a nutshell, short-term goals are the building blocks of success. But what are they exactly?

There's no universally accepted definition of a short-term goal, but a good rule of thumb is that short-term goals can be completed within a year.

Short-term goals include everything from simple daily goals ("Eat five servings of fruit or veggies every day") to yearly goals ("Lose 30 pounds of body fat").

This means that weekly and monthly goals also fall within the category of short-term goals. Here are some more examples of short-term goals:

• Successfully pass the math exam next week
  
• Do my first pull-up in three months
  
• Meditate every day for an entire month
  

Short-term goals are often highly motivating. After all, the desired result is just around the corner! Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel helps your body and mind really focus on the tasks at hand.

Last but not least, long-term goals aren't just big distant dreams. They're sequences of short-term goals. For example, if your long-term goal is to become a marathon runner, you might achieve more success if you break it into short-term goals such as "run my first 5K race in three months," "run my first 10K race in half a year," and so on. These short-term goals serve as building blocks for your big goal.

To help you set and achieve short-term goals, we've collected seven top-notch tips for you. The examples below refer to career goals, but you can apply them to short-term goals in any area of your life.

A goal without a plan is just a wish. Successful people set ambitious but realistic long-term goals and break them down into logical sequences of medium- and short-term goals.

Once you've got your long-term goals figured out, work backward and identify the steps you need to achieve them. For example, the goal of becoming a tech CEO can include steps like learning tech skills, coming up with a brilliant business idea, and so on.

Then, convert these steps to SMART goals: goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

You can't be good at everything, so choose areas of expertise that you're going to focus on. Often, there are many paths toward a long-term goal. For example, if you want to become a millionaire, you can start successful businesses, invest in the stock market, or maybe become a venture capitalist.

Once you've chosen your areas of focus, you'll be able to break an overwhelmingly ambitious long-term goal into a series of achievable short-term goals.

Successful people are always learning, even people like Bill Gates who seem to have achieved it all. Instead of just napping on a ceiling-high pile of cash, Gates reads around 50 books every year. That's practically one book every week!

You can read books and blogs, watch instructional videos on YouTube, download apps that teach you helpful skills, or invest in high-quality online courses. The possibilities are endless!

If your short-term goals revolve around your career and making money, it's important that you stay on top of the trends in your professional community. If you're a web developer and everyone in your community is suddenly learning a new scripting language, then follow suit and, ideally, become a leading expert on this new language. This will help you stay on top of your competitors in the job market.

Soft skills are specific personality traits and behaviors, such as teamwork, problem solving, effective communication, and flexibility.

You can reprogram your behaviors by building better habits and practicing them consistently. For example, if you want to improve your dependability, build habits like showing up on time and planning your projects beforehand so you aren't rushing to complete everything right before the deadline.

Soft skills like these won't help you achieve all of your goals automatically, but they definitely make your life and career much easier. This means that you can dedicate more mental energy to your goals!

The T in SMART goals stands for Time-bound. Every goal should have a clear deadline. Otherwise, you risk procrastinating or simply wandering off the path you've planned so carefully beforehand.

Be generous with your deadlines when you're just starting out on your self-improvement journey. You're likely to underestimate how much time you actually need to achieve a specific goal and may set deadlines that are too strict. Give your deadlines some breathing room.

For example, if you think you can create your first website in a week, give yourself two weeks instead. That way, you'll meet your deadline – and achieve your goal – even if unexpected technical problems turn up.

When setting deadlines, finding the balance between self-discipline and self-compassion is crucial.

Self-discipline means you won't postpone your deadlines just because you're feeling lazy. But on the other hand, it's important to be compassionate toward yourself and adjust your deadlines when you recognize that they're not achievable. If you were training for a marathon and got injured in the process, it's okay to adjust your deadlines and participate in a later run if you don't feel quite ready.

Short-term goals help you achieve success one step at a time. They're crucial for maintaining motivation and accomplishing your bigger goals, so make sure you spend some time writing them down and tracking them.

Stick to a proven framework such as SMART goals to make sure that your goals are actually specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This will set you up for small wins every day, and these small wins will lead to bigger and bigger victories if you continue to work hard.