Goal Setting Part 5 | Organize To Prioritize

Ok, you’ve arrived here after doing a slash and burn on your massive goal list. That either felt really good and cathartic — like you were cleaning out your closet and organizing your pantry (OCD much?). OR, if you’re like most people, it may have felt really scary and overwhelming, especially because so much is changing day to day due to COVID (ie. Will kids EVER go back to school? Will I ever sleep more than 5 hours per night again?).

I get it — it can be so dang hard to figure out what deserves your immediate attention right now, what to put on hold for next month or year, and what to eliminate because it isn’t mapping to anything tangible or valuable in your life. If you’re still circling the wagon, trying to figure out what goals to prioritize, fear not! That’s what we’re going to tackle in this exercise.

Your task:

Below, we are going to take your newly refined goal list and put them into groupings, or what we’ll call “collections.” Once you see your goals grouped together, you’ll start to recognize that there is a natural hierarchy in each group — there is one that will take massive planning, but there will also be smaller goals that can act as catalysts or stepping stones along your path to the bigger thing. This is where the transformation starts to appear — when you recognize how the small, medium and BHAG-type goals depend on each other to enable the next step.

Here’s how to organize to prioritize:

Step 1: Define your collections

Scan through your goals from Part 4. Pull out overarching themes that can encompass several goals. Examples would be: health, relationship/marriage, family, career, business, happiness, home, kids, long term, short term, etc. Keep these fairly high level so they don’t become a goal, in and of themselves, but rather all the goals can be defined by this one word. You’ll use this later to decide what constitutes the highest priority.

Step 2: Group your goals

Write down the specific goals that correspond to your collections. So, let’s say the collection is career, and you put in goals such as: get a raise in 6 months, start my own business, launch my side hustle, impress my boss, go to a conference, etc. Once you see what’s in each collection, you can identify which one will require a lot of planning ahead, and which ones require you to merely put a date on a calendar each month.

This will help you prioritize which goals in each collection are worth it. Don’t be afraid to scrap even more goals here.

Note: We’ll define task lists and systems to map your path in the next post, so grouping your goals is a key step in understanding which goals to create systems for, and which require far less commitment (like putting an hour aside per day for exercise).

Step 3: Be honest (again, yes — seeing a theme here?)

Understand that you can’t do every single thing today, this week, this month, or even this year. There will be guaranteed interceptions of your time.

Don’t overwhelm yourself thinking that you can complete all of your goals because, as we discussed in a prior post, goals will inevitably compete for your attention so strip them down to only the bare essentials, and surface the goals that you’re motivated to sacrifice for, in all honesty.

The final details!

Ok, that’s it for now! Next I will share Part 6: Map Your Actions & Systematize. I If you want more info on this series, visit Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, or Part 4 here. If you like this post, or this series, share it using links below or to your left. Then follow me on Instagram/Facebook at @rawstrategy, sign up for my emails here. And PLEASE leave a comment below on how this has impacted you, or shoot me a note with any clarifying questions — I’m here to help you through this process!

Want more?

If you or your business need a deeper dive that his customized, reach out! DM me, email me, call, text, whatever and we’ll schedule a time to do a business-specific Zoom session (typically anywhere from 2–6 hours depending on your business) where we get really specific on your challenges, and narrow down the exact systems and solutions you can implement in your business now. My vow to you is that I will ask the hard questions to get you on the path toward action. Once COVID is finito, we can explore even more in-person or group training sessions for your business. Ok, thanks for reading. More soon!