Goal Tracker Tips – How to Make This Year Your Best Year

What are you working towards? Do you even know where you want to be in a year’s time? Saving money for travel? Start a business? Have a more organized home life? Not much of it will become reality without proper planning and having goal tracker methods. With Enzo and these practical tips, we’ll help you achieve more and even exceed your own expectations.
Fact: even when you’re passionate about something, it’s rarely enough to turn a goal into reality. You need a plan and goal tracker skills to reach your dreams.
Don’t worry!
Never again do you have to live with regret about not reaching that goal you set for yourself. We’re here to share some of the most effective—and user-friendly—ways to keep goals on track.
Realising Your Dreams with Effective Goal Tracking
How easy life would be if we could simply jump in, start working at a goal and be assured of success. But life isn’t that easy. However, you can increase your chances of success by using these tried and tested tips on implementing a plan and have goal tracker methodologies. Make them part of your life skills and see how much more you achieve.
First Step: Write it Down
Do you know exactly where you’re headed? For business goals or simply a plan to improve your family life, set it down on paper before you do anything else.
Can you state your goal in a few—or even just one—sentence? If not, you’re still unclear about what exactly you want out of the situation. And without clear direction it will be difficult to make the right decisions or inspire others to help you reach that target.
If Relevant – Collaborate
Experts also suggest talking to others about your goal at hand, instead of just telling others what you expect of them. This applies to business environments, but also families and where you share space with roommates.
If you don’t have others’ buy in, a home renovation or even a simple goal like decluttering the attic can be chaotic because other parties won’t be enthusiastic about your way of doing things. Rather ask for input and use everyone’s ideas and areas of expertise.
Also, having different perspectives and backgrounds will help you plan efficiently for parts of the plan where you may have overlooked something. And lastly, these individuals are part of your goal tracker system, since they can tell you when your actions no longer benefit the agreed upon goal and plan.
Turn a Goal into Milestones
The plan you all agree on now needs to be turned into action. But a broad statement like ‘renovate the kitchen’, ‘start a business’ or ‘clean the garage’ is kind of overwhelming. Break it down into all the smaller activities it will take to achieve the bigger goal. This aligns with the SMART goals approach (see below) and works because:
The SMART Goal Approach
Many experts promote the SMART goal mindset. If your goals adhere to the words this acronym refers to, there’s a better chance of achieving them. In short, your goals should be:
Adding and Deleting the Small Things
Reaching a goal may not only be about the new things you establish. Consider how the disappearance of a ‘bad’ thing can benefit the outcome.
For example, if your goal is to live healthier and weigh less 12 months from now, you probably have an eating plan and a gym membership planned. But what about stopping your smoking habit or putting less sugar in your coffee from now on?
Closely related to this is acknowledging how small changes accumulate into big wins over time. For a business, finding just one way to save some money each month can make a huge difference in your bottom line over the course of a few months.
Your accountant and the team may feel overwhelmed identifying all problems at once and implementing changes in one go. But incremental adjustments are realistic to implement and make part of company—of family—culture over time.
So, what ONE thing can you do better today?
Add all these to your milestones that your goal tracker system must monitor. No longer being at the mercy of a bad habit is one more thing you’ll be able to.
Plans Must Cater for Obstacles
When you make your plans, always think honestly about everything that could go wrong along the way. You need contingency plans in place, such as backup funding, so you can continue working towards the goal despite difficulties.
Analyse and Adjust
You don’t simply just MAKE a plan. You also need to measure whether you’re achieving the goals of that plan. This could be in terms of costs, staying on schedule or whether the milestones are in fact bringing you closer to the ultimate goal. If your analysis shows problems, make adjustments. Spending time on this part of your goal tracker plan helps you avoid disaster or missing the mark altogether.
Celebrations and Rewards
Here’s another reason for proper analysis. Having an effective goal tracker system helps you make a plan into reality. But don’t wait until then before you celebrate. Some plans may take months or even years. You may feel you’ll never get to the end and give up halfway. Rather identify the progress and celebrate those small victories. You’ll have a realistic perspective of how far you’ve come and stay motivated throughout.
Goal Tracker Tools that Really Work
Committing to achieving a certain goal can be overwhelming. Thankfully, modern tools can make it a little easier to achieve and these three examples showcase a few to consider for your own goal tracker processes.
Chore Tracker Apps
Key to reaching those goals is getting many small things done. From planning to finding the money to pursue a dream, you’ll need to work hard. Or perhaps your goal is simply to renovate the house in the coming 12 months and you need the whole family to help with DIY tasks, cleaning up or picking paint colors?
All of these processes get a little easier when you keep everyone up to date of what you expect of them. A digital app that everyone can access via their mobile devices will help you communicate tasks and even remind them of their responsibilities, so plans don’t fall behind schedule.
On an advanced app like Enzo you’ll even find features to help keep track of bills. Because let’s face it, reaching goals will usually have a financial aspect to consider too.
Digital Calendars
Calendars are helpful tools for goal tracking because it’s easy to track due dates on them. A digital version—especially one you can access online from any device, means you have access to the information at any time, from anywhere.
At a glance you can see what the week, month or even year has in store or what you need to plan for. You can break large goals into smaller milestones and add them to your business or personal calendar. Remind yourself what you’re working for and how important it is to follow those to do lists.
Lastly, this helps you make decisions that will benefit your goal setting. If the family wants to organize a holiday close to the launch of a new product or during the time you need to spend with investors, you can ask them to adjust dates slightly to suit everyone involved. This way, you maintain balance between everything that’s important in life.
Spreadsheets
A spreadsheet isn’t the most efficient in terms of reminding you of day-to-day tasks, but it helps keep information organized. Also, it’s the ideal tool to keep track of your budget.
The most efficient approach, especially for large projects and life goals, is perhaps to use multiple goal tracker tools to complement each other.
Mindmaps
Mindmaps may be more useful at the outset of your goal setting. But don’t disregard it once you’ve formulated a plan. A mindmap can serve you well to keep you inspired, maintain perspective on where you’re headed and give you a quick overview of all you’re pursuing.
Use paper and ink and then pin it to your bedroom wall, or use digital mindmap tools—whatever works for you to get the creative juices flowing.
Become an Expert Goal Tracker with Enzo
The Enzochore tracker app is designed to help households manage tasks, bills and living arrangements so much easier. But its features have various applications. So, no matter what your goal is you want to achieve by this time next year, talk to us. We’ll tell you how one app can help you—and your team, family or roommates—achieve each milestone by its due date and live with the satisfaction of making dreams REAL.
For questions or suggestions, talk to our team: olivier@enzo-app.co