Goal setting isn't exclusive to New Year's Resolutions. The opportunity is always present for a clean slate to establish a new set of goals for yourself.
Assess Where You've Been
The first thing to do is to make an assessment of yourself - where do you want to be versus where you are. Be honest in your assessment - where have you veered off course? Why? If you start to notice patterns in where you missed your goals, take some time and analyze it. It could mean that you simply need a better plan laid out in order to achieve your goals.
Prune Your List
Cut your list down to three or four broad goals to move your business forward. It’s easy as leaders or entrepreneurs to get too excited about opportunities and set a wide range of unattainable goals. But if we can start to cull our list to a manageable number of yearly markers, we can more easily define clear paths in which to accomplish them.
Have a Plan
One of most important parts of goal setting is the plan. How are you going to meet your goals? From your pruned list of broad objectives, lay out the actions that will allow you to achieve that goal. Identify the most important actions you can take and make those your priority. Carve yourself a path to the major milestones in your plan. Having an idea of the most important pieces of your plan will go a long way to keeping you on track.
Take some time as well to lay out actions that have to be completed before other actions can be taken. This will allow you to understand where your priorities should be as well as giving you a basic timeline on when and how you can expect to start seeing results. You can effectively create a checklist - something to help you visualize your progress as the year progresses.
Just Do It
Setting goals is important, but ultimately means nothing unless you take steps to accomplish those goals. Do something every single day that will help you towards achieving your goals. If you’ve laid out clear goals and a clear path to get to them, you will see yourself moving towards your goals more quickly than ever before.