In productivity management courses you must have heard of setting SMART goals and breaking them down into smaller chunks. Call these short term goals. An example will be “I want to build my business to earn half a million in x months”. “And in the next y months I want to achieve x number of product lines with so many channel or affiliate partners”. “And in the next month, I want to be able to test out the different strategies I have for my business model”.

Heard that before? Good, take that further and have recurring shorter term goal every 30 days. Research found something magical about the cycle of 30 days. Make a plan for every 30 days and let those lead you to your annual plan.

This is nothing new really. In project management, the first thing you map out will be the end results, the timeline and resources. Of course you will also want to take into considerations the risks involved; some will be within control, and some not. So there will be some deviations.

What Is The Name of Your Game? – What is your long term plan? What path would lead you there? What are your options? What is your project plan for the next 30 days for your business? If you do not take control of the time on hand, it will control you. And then time will fly by without your realising it.

What Is Your Manageable Time Line? – You can chart out your days into hours and even minutes for the intermediate results you want. As the Good Book says, our days are numbered. We live on borrowed time. Life is short, what would you want to do every 30 days of your life?

Have a structure no matter how loose. Otherwise, nothing much will get done. Assuming you have a full time job and still want to build a home based business, say you want to invest 2-3 hours a day 6 days a week (no body says building a business is easy and it does not happen overnight either), how will you utilise the next 72 hours or so in the next 30 days?

Have a Date with Yourself – You have to literally chart out and pen these chunks of time down on your calendar. These are appointments you make with yourself to do what you need to do to kick start your project/business.

Here Is The Outcome I want – Be very clear what the end result is after 30 days. “I want to know my market well” will not serve you much. You need to know exactly who you want to serve, what life style these people have, where do they hang out, what are their consuming habits, how do they prefer to buy, what price points do they normally buy at, and how they can be reached.

Unless you list these downs on a check list, at the end of 30 days, you may find that you have veered off to reading a lot of articles, joined a lot of forum, tweeted, visited multiple social media sites and yet not come up with a clearer picture of your market. How about set yourself up to answer one of these questions every x days? Now that is a tighter result to deliver. Do not forget testing either.

In summary, one of the things that will get you to your goal is to set doable size shorter term goals every 30 days. Break down your vision into smaller projects of 30 days to track progress and status. Have a challenge every 30 days to stretch you out of your comfort zone towards your goal.

And unless you have an immovable deadline you will keep putting off your project, and you will get caught in the perfection game. So whether it is to start the next market research or to send out the next batch of email campaign you will need an unmovable deadline. With that, your creative juice will start flowing and your project will progress steadily towards your planned goals.

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