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When you look at your personal goals for work, your career, your life, and your family, have you ever wanted to:

• achieve things that seem impossible or unattainable?
• convert a lack of resources into a great cause or movement?
• recruit people to take action based on your cause or project?

Then you have to take 26 minutes and watch the presentation from Tim Ferriss in the video below.  This was Tim’s presentation at the Do Lectures.

Reading this in email?  Watch the video here.

This post is part of the One Goal Project to achieve exceptional performance at work.  Learn more.

Feeling overloaded?  Try these two templates. (source: antwerpenR / CC 2.0)

My team hears me say it all the time, and it always goes something like this:

“We all have a hundred things on our plate, but are you working on the right things today?”

Easy enough to say, but harder still to deliver on. Why? Because we are creatures of habit.  We show up (physically) on Monday morning. We check email and voice mail and then “ping pong syndrome” begins.

What is “ping pong syndrome”?

Reacting. Bouncing back and forth between all the things competing for your attention all day long.  Reacting to emails and voice mails, trying to please our leaders, reacting to our Clients’ needs, and our teams’ issues. Reacting to the voices in our heads, the feedback from family and friends, and what the media tells us we should be doing.  We spend so much time reacting all week, that before you know it, its Friday.

Did you know?

A University of California – Irvine study showed that information workers are interrupted on average every 3 minutes.  In addition, a study at Intel showed people spending 20 hours per week processing email.  (source: IEEE Spectrum)

Here are two insanely practical tools that can help you BE CERTAIN you are working on the right things, and avoiding ping pong syndrome:

Goal Setting Worksheet

This Goal Setting Worksheet will help you organize your goals, to dos, and/or projects to help you make the biggest impact in your life or career.

Updating this each week will only take about 10 minutes if you have all of your goals, to dos, and projects organized.

Here’s what you do:

• Simply draw 4 quadrants on a piece of paper (or in Excel).
• Label the top of the vertical line “High Impact” and the bottom of the vertical line “Low Impact”.
• Next, label the left side of the horizontal line “High Effort” and the right side of the horizontal line “Low Effort”.

Now, place all of your goals, tasks, or projects in the quadrants. Quickly, you’ll find the things that have low effort/ high impact. Work on those first. Then, move to high effort/high impact!

Download the Goal Setting Worksheet Template (Excel).

Weekly Planner Template

This Weekly Planner Template (borrowed from the teachings of Stephen Covey) will help you organize the most important things to do in each “role” you play in your life.  Combined with the Goal Setting Worksheet above, you can easily identify those things that will have the biggest impact.

Creating one each week should not take you longer than 10 minutes.

Here’s how to use it:

• Simply write in all of the roles you have. As you’ll see in my example, I put in things like Husband, Father, Team Leader, etc.
• Then, ask yourself “What is the most important thing I can do in this role this week?”
• Pull the best high impact/low effort and high impact/high effort goals, tasks, or projects that you will accomplish THIS WEEK from the Goal Setting Worksheet, or any other to-do list you maintain.
• Fill in the “Sharpening the Saw” section – which contains the 4 areas of your personal development each week.  Sharpening the Saw refers to Habit 7 in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.  Learn more on the complete Franklin Covey approach.

Download the Weekly Planner Template (Excel).

Hopefully these two tools will help you focus your biggest decision – where to spend your time – much more effectively.  Will you be able to consistently do this type of goal setting each week?  Not always.  But, doing this more often than not, and getting in the habit of doing so is time extremely well spent.

Do you have feedback on these ideas or have your own to share? Leave a comment!

Are you looking for an effective personal development plan template to help you set your goals?

Bill Parker has a post on his blog that shows how to set your goals using a very simple, effective method.  I believe that the best plans are both easy to create and easy to track.  Bill’s plan is both of these things.  From start to finish, his annual goal setting process is just 4 steps and only takes him 45 minutes to do.

Check out Bill’s personal development plan.

What I like most about Bill’s approach is the simple goal tracking chart that he keeps in his wallet.  This goal chart let’s Bill easily track progress on his goals throughout the year.  You’ll also see Bill’s goal tracking chart on his blog.

“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.”

- M.C Escher

If you’d like to work on goal setting and still haven’t created your new years resolutions, here’s the method I use to create mine.  I’ve also included some tools, articles, videos, and a podcast to help inspire you.

1. Review what you learned in 2008. Sit down and brainstorm a list of your the most meaningful moments, events, memories, accomplishments, and mistakes of 2008. Try to extract lessons from those things that you can use. You can read an excerpt from my list here.

2. Conduct a “personal brand” audit to see how you’ve grown in the past year. You can copy and use the brand equity checklist located here.

3. Honestly identify chronic problems you have. Most often, we limit our own growth with chronic bad habits. What are those 2 or 3 habits you have that impede your personal growth?  If you can’t answer that question, think about the 2 or 3 things you wish you could do better.  What’s preventing you from doing them?  Then, use the 5 whys method to determine the root of the problem, and try Leo Babauta’s one habit at-a-time modification method.

4. Ask yourself 3 simple questions: What are your passions? What are your values? What is your purpose?  If you take the time to sit down, clear your mind, and truly answer these questions, you’ll shift your focus to lining up your life with them.

5. Dig deeper to understand how to improve yourself this year using your answers from #4 above. Some recommended ways to do this: Envision U’s 45-day leadership challenge, Mark Stevens’ success self-analysis, Franklin Covey’s prioritization systems, and Tim Ferriss’ Low Information Diet series of articles.

6. Establish your prism – the lens through which you see things. As we learned in the Mark Stevens interview, successful leaders have a prism they use to provide context to the world around them. Right now, I like to use a combination of inspirational quotes, metaphors, and Newton’s laws as my prism.

7. Get motivated! Let these inspirational video and audio clips lift you up when you’re in a bad mood, or just not in the right frame of mind to work on setting goals: Tim Ferriss on thinking big and challenging conventional thinking (video, especially the last 1/3 of it). A former New York Yankee batboy on persistence (podcast, a fantastic story about how he got the job). Michael Jordan on failure (YouTube video).

8. Set no more than 3 achievable, memorable goals that you can do one at a time (linearly, so you aren’t trying to accomplish more than one at a time). Then, track your progress. Make sure you accomplish one of these goals in January to capitalize on the power of momentum!

Good luck!

UPDATE: Having trouble achieving those things you set out to do at the beginning of the year?  Check out these 5 tips from Zen Habits.

“Common men go nowhere.  You have to be uncommon.”

- Herb Brooks, from the movie Miracle

When I began creating my new years resolutions and working on personal goal setting for 2009, I took some time to reflect on the past year.  2008 was an amazing, challenging year.  The biggest event – by far  – was the birth of our daughter.  Beyond that, but the year was filled with ups and downs, trial and error, and some truly amazing experiences.

Here are some of the things I learned in the past year…

• When your baby sees you and smiles, it makes your world stop. Literally. Having a child with my wonderful wife is an amazing experience and crazy adventure…and I know we’re only just beginning it!
• If you open your mind to the potential of others, they will amaze you. Some leaders try to push their own “fire” into other people.  I believe that it’s already there, and as a leader, you have to pull it out.  In 2008, three people on my team at Quicken Loans launched important, new websites.  The best part? None of these folks had launched a website before, or had been leading web projects for more than a year.  Man, am I proud of them!
• What you focus on you find. In the past year, we survived a literal hurricane in the mortgage industry. How? We were passionate, persistent, and focused on the goal at hand.  Several times, in several different ways throughout the year, my team and I achieved goals that seemed impossible.  We did this by staying dedicated to each other, and ruthlessly focused on our goals.
• Persistence wins in the long term. I’ve been working on a specific Internet marketing project for the past 7 months – a lifetime in Internet time.  Only now are we seeing consistent results.  This was after several people had told me no, and that the project couldn’t be done. I really believe that “informed persistence” (I.e. deconstructing an issue and knowing everything possible about it, while also ruthlessly following up on progress) was the key to the project’s recent success.
• Companies can change greatly when they are acquired. Sometimes, even the best relationships can’t overcome the effects of a merger or acquisition.
• Deals can be created out of nothing, as long as they solve a need. I created several new deals this year that didn’t exist previously by simply solving a defined need with a solid, mutually-beneficial idea.
• Relationships are the rock upon which everything, I mean everything, is built. You know the old saying “nothing happens until something gets sold”?  Well, nothing gets sold until there’s a relationship.  I simply wouldn’t have been able to succeed in the past year if it weren’t for all the wonderful people in my life.
• With the Internet, you are only 1 person removed from some amazing people. Through this blog, I’ve met some amazingly smart and talented people over the past year – people I likely would have never met otherwise.  Thank you for reading and participating in this with me!