100 Days to Success

I recently read an article in Success For Women Magazine about how the CEO of PBS achieves success by breaking her one, five and ten-year goals into 100 day increments. This immediately resonated with me because I personally find goal setting to be overwhelming and I believe it is one of the things that has been keeping me from achieving the success I've sought after for so long. I always see these big elaborate goal setting programs that require you to basically map out your life and follow the yellow brick road to victory. Sounds great but I honestly don't have time or patience to do it. However, 100 days sounded VERY doable for me so I started thinking, what could I accomplish 100 days from now? Could I be healthier? Have more money in my bank account? Read that book that's been collecting dust on my nightstand for months? What could I do with a 100 day deadline?

Set a Date and Put It In Writing

I started thinking about all of the possibilities and immediately got excited. So one night after my husband and daughter went to sleep, I stayed up a little later and fired up the computer. I opened my Outlook calendar and counted 100 days from that date. March 10th was the magic date so I created an event called "100 Day Mark" and created a list of bold headings titled:
Health Goals
Business Goals
Family Goals
Spiritual Goals
Personal Goals

Under each one of these headings I listed 1-3 things I thought I could accomplish in 100 days. I was so excited but I knew I had to break it up a little bit more because it was still a bit daunting to look at this list.

The Halfway Point
The next thing I did was count 50 days from the starting date to create a halfway point toward achieving my goals. I listed all of the same goals as on my 100 day mark but I looked at each goal and decided what I could accomplish by the halfway point and entered that information in a different color in parenthesis next to the goal. For example. My 100 day health goals consist of the following:

1. Lose 30 pounds by March 10th (in orange I wrote "lose 15 pounds")
2. Walk 45 Minutes/day (in orange I wrote "should be up to 30 minutes")
3. Drink 8 glasses of water/day (in orange I wrote "should be drinking 4-6 by now")

I proceeded to do the same thing with the rest of my goals.

Break Them Down Again
Once I had a 50 day mark, I decided to create two more milestone dates: 25 days and 75 days. I followed the same steps I did for the 50 day mark. I decided where I should be at that point and wrote it in next to the original goal.

Daily Baby Steps
Now that I've got my four milestone dates I thought it would be good to break each 25 days into daily baby steps that I can take toward achieving success in each of those four increments and ultimately my final 100 day goals. I'm still working on filling in the daily goals but it's going well.

I still don't know if I will attempt the one-year, five-year and ten-year goals the way the woman did in the article but I'm definitely inspired to give these next 100 days or so a shot. I'm determined to achieve everything on my list and when that happens I will keep going with the next 100. Achieving my dreams 100 days at a time. I'd love to hear what your process is for setting goals. Please feel free to comment!

I will keep you posted on my progress. Stay tuned! Until then have a great week!!!

Jackie