How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

The secret to success….segmenting

If you want to get a goal done, and done right, then you need to learn the secret of breaking your goals up.

It’s not enough to break your goal up into 2 or three steps.

No, to really be successful, break those goals down into yearly, quarterly, and seasonal goals.

Here’s where most people miss it…they pick a goal like weight loss. That’s it. Come on, people, how can anyone lose weight like that? Actually, everyone. Because there is no accountability to a goal like that. “Um… yea, I think I lost some weight….my pants do feel a little bit looser”. Vague goals like that only serve to salve our conscience or set us up for failure, because for a goal to be attainable, it must be well defined.

You want your goal to be specific, attainable, and measurable.

Then, very clearly define your goal.

Break that goal down into actionable, daily and maybe even morning, afternoon, evening goals.

I’ve decided to start a time management workshop for all of my readers. I plan on hosting it some time in March, depending on the interest level. If  you think your life could be more strategized, subscribe here:

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How to break (or start) any bad habit in three weeks, max

Dislaimer: If you are suffering from an addiction to drugs or alcohol, or if you are suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, then you may find this advice incomplete for your needs. It’s my moral obligation to encourage you to get professional help for these things.

Okay, we’ve all read the reports from articles like “Psychology today” that tell us it takes exactly 21 days to form a new habit. But the truth is, very few people actually do anything for 21 days perfectly. So maybe you want to get in the habit of not biting your finger nails. Well, that is a poor habit to try this with, because that deals with not doing something moment by moment. Someone who bites their nails, or curses, or interrupts, will have to monitor their behavior moment by moment, and it may be very hard to track.  So this exercise I am going to give you must be applied to a habit that is trackable on a daily basis….and not on something that you can’t track unless you monitor it ALL Day.

Quick note: smoking is an addiction. My father hyperventilated when he tried to quit cold turkey and they called an ambulance. My husband cried in  a restaurant after going all day without a cigarette (I said I wouldn’t marry him unless he quit smoking). And I have personally witnessed loved ones act like living brain donors when they didn’t taper off cigarettes slowly. Please treat smoking like the physical addiction that it is. You can be treated medically to quit smoking.

But now, let’s talk about what this exercise will work on. If you

• Want to start an exercise routine that you do each day
• Want to get in the habit of journaling every day
• Want to practice learning a foreign language every day
• Want to learn how to master playing a musical instruments

than these are goals that you can do every day.  Just make sure you choose a goal that is:

a definite, specific goal:

Something that is measurable, not vague

an actual daily goal:

So, again, getting slim by the end of this year is not a measurable, daily goal

an achievable goal:

something that you can definitely achieve on each of these 21 days. If you make the goal too difficult, then you will most certainly not finish the 3 week time period; you’ll just…quit 😦

It’s more important to set a goal that you know you will reach. For example, with nail biting, set a goal of not biting your nails between 12 and 1 oclock each day (that’s a trackable daily goal), and then ask your friends to monitor your beahavior during your lunch break (believe me, other people will love being asked to hold you accountable for something). After 21 days, you should find that you are no longer biting your nails during lunch time. Then, go for supper time the next 21 day period. You don’t want to give yourself too many habits to form or break during each 21 day period.

Just in case you don’t know, 21 days is that length of time which has been medically proven to cause a habit to “stick”. In other words if you can do or not do something for 3 weeks straight, then you can develop or break any habit–in theory. The reality though, is, with a bad habit, you may need to reinforce the 21 day exercise after several months. That’s because, it’s easier to form a habit than to delete a long held habit

Are you enjoying these posts? If you are, hit the “like” button. Want some more “stick to it” juice? Sign up for my email series on time management. it’s a 12 part series that shows you how to get control of your time and life. (due to the incredible influx of spam, I now must verify all respondents. Will only call you if I’m not sure about your contact info.

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The Rock Solid New Year’s Resolution

Here’s the only New Year’s resolution I have ever seen work, and I want to share it with  you….resolve to give yourself ONE FULL MONTH to come up with systems that actually work.

You don’t want to have a New Year filled with failure. But come on reader, don’t  you know, you set yourself up for that every single year? New Year’s resolutions are just things that you resolve to do in the New Year. They aren’t things you resolve to do perfectly every time. I wrote about this extensively in last year’s article.

This year, set yourself up for success. Give yourself ONE FULL YEAR to develop systems that work. Determine what your year end goal is, and then take one month (January) to break those year end goals down into smaller goals.

Wednesday, read my article on How To Start Your New Year right.

And when you’re ready, sign up for my time management newsletter.

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How to fulfill your dreams

A lot of people are into this “Creative Visualization” movement, where they “see” themselves being successful. and I suppose that could work…provided they see themselves doing the steps necessary to get them there.

Friend, do you have a step by step blueprint of what it will take to get youto your internet marketing goals?  The new year is upon us, and it’s a great time to start thinking about where you want to go with your business.

 

The Best Game Plan for your internet Marketing Business

Does your game plan keep disappearing from day to day, and getting replaced with the latest trick? Here are some common lies that are being promoted on the internet. Do you believe this internal dialogue?

“The best marketing plan for my business is one that gets me lots of followers on Facebook”

(next)

“The best marketing plan for my business is one that brings me traffic.”

Okay. That’s a good start. Let’s go on.

“The Best Marketing plan for my business is one that actually makes me sales, already!!

…you’re getting warm…

“The Best Marketing plan for my business is one the makes me Money, for crying out loud!

Partially true…read on…

The Best Marketing plan for my business is the one that actually makes me a profit…

…you’re almost there…

“Sue, what are you talking about? You don’t think it’s important that I make a profit”?

Let me explain–

If you get lots of people who:

• like your product,
• follow you on Facebook, Twitter Instagram…everything
• and who visit your website

and who even buy from you
but
what you spend in:

• advertising
• webhosting
• software
• “opportunities”
  and other expenses—-if those expenses are deducted, and they actually DO bring you a profit, then you still have some math to do…because…

it really isn’t profit if your time isn’t paid for.

So. Let’s say that you make 25,000 a year in PURE PROFIT.
Let me ask you something….is the time you invested in making that money worth more than minimum wage? Because, if it is, then you didn’t even make that.

See, a lot of marketers are very good at bookkeeping, but they live in this carrot-on-the stick fantasy world.

They may not measure their success (like so many marketers do) in terms of social media activity, traffic or even sales, because they have been around the block, so to speak, and they have learned that it isn’t what you make, it’s what you keep (after buying leads, paying for ads, etceters.)

But one thing that almost every marketer struggles with is putting value on their time.

A lot of marketers are retired, on disablility, or just self-employed. So they don’t figure in the value of their time, because they just think, I’m not doing anything else with my time right now.

But time always has value, no matter how much of it you think that you have.
We would never hear of someone underselling their product because they have too much money on their hands. Yet marketers consistently undersell their product because they don’t factor in the value of their time, when they go to price their product.

You need to see the value of your time the way that a physical shop owner would price his “overhead”. You may not have the mortgage, lights and gas to pay on a separate building, you may not have inventory to account for, but you can be sure, if you are an internet marketer, you spend plenty time on your business each week.

And what a lot of marketers fail to do is to track the time they actually spend on their business, not taking into account basic things like creating a post, checking their stats, ect. All of these tasks are YOUR TIME that you are INVESTING in your business. You need to account for that when you figure out your profit margin.