Time is the one constant and most important resource that everyone has equally. Yet, it is also the number one excuse we give for not following through on our goals and dreams: “That would be nice, but I just don’t have the time.” The truth is that we have all the time that there is… We all have the same 24 hours a day. What I have found are the main culprits for those not achieving what they want is not a lack of time, desire or talent but rather a combination of:
Not creating a proactive and proven plan
Being manipulated to distraction by social media, tech companies, & media
Letting the views and priorities of others take precedence over our own
Having to fight our evolutionary tendencies to conserve energy
Relying solely on willpower
Not reinforcing the reasons to achieve our goal into our nervous and RAS system
Being exhausted and having low energy
Having limiting beliefs that cause subconscious sabotage
Here are the steps I rely on myself and have helped coach hundreds of others to dramatically improve their lives, both from a financial and fulfillment perspective.
Often our goals are just not big enough to inspire us to act or we have not conditioned our nervous and reticular activation systems (RAS) to make achieving them a must. RAS is the biological system that filters out the stimulus we receive from our senses. It only lets what it has been wired to think is important into our consciousness. This is partly because as a society most of us are taught to play small, not rock the boat, and just do enough to get by unnoticed.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?" – Marianne Williamson
Yet deep inside, when we settle for smaller goals, it destroys our motivation and desire to try our best. Having bigger goals that inspire us forces us out of our comfort zone and causes massive growth and confidence. Which creates even more momentum and positives in our life. In fact, I’m sure once you achieve your current goals you will simply replace them with even bigger goals and continue to grow. This is an essential part of our existence; we were not born to play small and yet so few of us tap into our full potential. So don’t be afraid to dream big. Anything is possible.
Download Free Goal Setting Worksheets
1. Brainstorm your goals - In a quiet area where you won’t be disturbed, put on some music that inspires, and with a pen and paper brainstorm anything and everything you want or have ever wanted to do, learn, purchase, become, or accomplish. I break this into four main sections and spend at least ten minutes on each:
Personal Goals – What do you want to learn? Are there are skills or hobbies you want to master or pick up again? Do you want to write a book? Share your expertise? Create something special? Tap into your creativity? Get into better shape and health? Are there any adventures or things you want to do with your family or friends? Do you want to meet or reconnect with anyone?
Career Goals – Do you want to achieve a certain position? Start a company or grow an existing one to a certain level? Do you want to learn skills that will help you in your current career? Develop a new product? Get better at sales or marketing? Hire more people? Learn to be a more effective leader? Close a certain number of deals per month?
Financial Goals – How much money do you want to make over the next 12 months? 5 years? 10 years? What about investing? Real estate holdings? Any credit card or college loan debt you want to pay off? Improve your credit ratings? How much do you need to survive? How much to be comfortable? How much to have abundance?
Fun Goals – What have you always wanted to buy for yourself? Your kids? Partner? Family? New car? A boat? Plane? Helicopter? Latest electronics? Equipment for a home gym? Do you want to hire a cook? Maid service? Someone to clean, iron and fold your laundry? Do you want to go on any trips or vacations? A Cruise? A safari?
2. Set a timeframe - Next to each goal write down the timeframe you want to achieve your goal within. I use 1, 3, 5, 10, and 20 years.
3. Identify your top one-year goals - Circle up to 3 top one-year goals in each category. These are the goals you are committed to achieving this year. Ensure they are also very specific, don’t have a goal that says I want to be rich, rather have a specific number associated with it, like I want to earn $25,000/month in recurring passive income.
4. Create urgency - Write down a paragraph or two describing the goal and why achieving it is an absolute must for you. Your reasons must be strong to ensure your subconscious won’t accidentally sabotage you from achieving it.
Just wanting something isn’t enough and neither is taking blind action without a clear plan in place that proactively allows you to take small steps towards your ultimate goal.
1. Research - The easiest way to create a plan is to role model those who have already achieved what you want to accomplish. Learn from them, even if it is buying their book, reading interviews, listening to podcasts on their mindsets, taking their courses, or reaching out with questions over email or social media. Use AI to help you research the best steps to take. What mindsets and beliefs do you need to achieve the goal? Who can help and inspire you to achieve them? What resources, including people, do you have available to help you achieve your goal?
2. Inspiration - Find a photo or image that represents the goal and inspires you. Look at it daily. You can even take an index card and write down your goal and tape it to your bathroom mirror, so you see it every morning when getting ready. Have your goals on a vision board or even computer or phone wallpaper. Review your goals in the morning and evening every day. Constantly keep it in front of you to train your RAS that these goals are important.
3. KPIs – Identify the key performance indicators (KPI) you need to accomplish to achieve your goals. You can think of them as the big goals that need to be completed to achieve the main goal. This allows you to break down larger tasks into smaller and easier to complete actions. Which helps you avoid feeling overwhelmed.
For example, I have a goal to weigh between 150-160lbs and 10% body fat. My KPIs were to create a home gym, implement a nutrition plan, implement a workout routine, and find ways to make working out fun. In sales, common KPIs are Lead Acquisition, Meetings Scheduled, Proposals Sent, Follow-Up Systems, Deals Won.
4. Identify Key Tasks – Next, list all the tasks that are needed for each KPI and star the key tasks that are essential. Remember, 20% of your efforts will bring in 80% of your results. This will help you focus on the most important tasks to achieve your goals. Then prioritize the remaining tasks and estimate how much time it will take for each task. It is better to add a 5x multiple to the time you think it will take if you are not sure. We tend to underestimate how much time a task will take us. I use the BITE Method. Blocks of time (each block is 10 minutes), Importance, Task and if I can Enlist anyone else to do it or help.
Repeat this for each KPI and then congratulate yourself! You now have a complete goal achievement plan that is measurable and contains concrete action steps that you can focus on without feeling overwhelmed and knockout one at a time.
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is not scheduling the tasks needed to achieve their goals first before anything else. Their daily to-do lists end up being reactive and based on other people’s priorities. A question I always ask myself: Will this help me get closer to one of my goals?
If the answer is no… and doing the task would not bring me or any of my loved one’s joy, why would I do it? How much is your time worth? What is the opportunity cost of doing things that don’t bring you towards your goals or bring you happiness?
This is why it’s essential to avoid being a consumer of social media, especially with reels and stories that are specifically designed to release dopamine into our system that gets us addicted to scrolling down to the next 60 second video. Before we realize it, it’s an hour or two later. They take advantage of our biology for their profits with little care for our wellbeing and health. Guard your time and focus always!
A goal centric time management system forces us to review our goal plan each week and take action daily towards our goals:
1. Schedule Weekly Sprints - One of the most used project management frameworks in coding and product development is the agile framework. It focuses on weekly sprints of tasks that allow quicker implementation, quality control and flexibility. Since you have also estimated the time each task will take, you can ensure you spread the tasks out over different weekly sprints, so you don’t overload yourself, but at the same time stay on track and continually move the needle forward. I will map out the weekly sprints for each quarter.
2. Optimize your daily schedule – At the end of week, I will review my current week and assign the weekly sprint tasks to the appropriate days.
I also create buckets, called Endgames, that allow you to group likeminded tasks together. I personally have four endgames that I use daily. It is extremely rare that the tasks I do will not fit into one of the buckets because I would have turned it down in most cases. They are Be the Dragon, Spread Joy, Advance Human Potential and Massive Wealth. Not only do they align with my life purpose, but the language used to describe them gives more meaning and motivation... even when the task is mundane because it’s connected to a higher purpose. Then using the BITE method, I have a detailed plan for my day.
I can further schedule my time for a quick snapshot of my schedule.
3. Create Routines – Using blocks of time to handle the same type of tasks each day, having a set wake and bedtime range, eating meals at the same time, having dedicated work hours for certain tasks with hard stop and start times all create a daily routine for me. This is helpful because it reduces the need to rely on willpower. I even set alarms, so I know when to move on to the next task and stay on schedule. For example, currently I’m waking up at 1:00AM, my core morning routine from 1AM to 3AM is still essential to starting my day right since I have biohacked myself sleep between 4 and 5 hours a night:
1:00 AM Wake Up Routine, Supplements, Plan Day, Light Therapy
1:30 AM Yoga and Meditation
2:00 AM Pre-workout Meal, Infrared Sauna, Mental Conditioning
3:00 AM Lift Weights, Cardio
5:00 AM Ready
5:30 AM Work
6:30 AM Kids AM
7:00 AM Work
12:00 PM Lunch
12:30 PM Work
5:30 PM WARD (Wellness/Art/Recreation/Dinner as Family)
Teach Kids Martial Arts, Flexibility Stretches
8:00 PM Kids Bed Prep
8:30 PM Sleep
As you see by the time most people are starting their day, I have taken care of my health, skill development, mentally visualized and conditioned my nervous system with my goals and empowering beliefs, and seen my kids off to school. Then I move on to my workday feeling refreshed and fulfilled.
I have three work blocks for a total of at least 11 focused working hours per weekday. I further breakdown that time into routines as much as possible. For example, I’ll have set days and times for content creation, checking emails, writing and coding. Even with more time dedicated on the weekends for family and home projects, I still have 80 hours of work time available each week, while spending over 9x more time with family than the average father per week and still being able to have at least four hours a day for myself.
This combination of knowing what I really want to achieve, conditioning the reasons into my nervous and RAS systems, developing a step-by-step proven blueprint of achievement, being able to easily schedule those tasks into weekly sprints and daily endgames, and creating environmental conditions and pattern interrupts to optimize productivity are the main factors that let me stay focused on achieving my goals without burning out or neglecting any other area of my life.
In my next articles, I’ll breakdown a few more strategies and frameworks I use to increase productivity and free up even more time into my schedule, which famously allows me to work up to 24 work months per year. As well as how I was able to bio-hack myself to sleep 4.5 hours a night while becoming even more healthy than when I was sleeping 6-9 hours.
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About this article: If you like this article and want more my free Dragon Forge Podcast will continually drop nuggets of gold on Business; Sleep, Time, Energy and Hacks; Fulfillment; and Achievement. Available on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify.
Join the Community: Want to access all the time management and goal achievement tools I created for myself, enhance skills from leading experts, and collaborate with a group of success driven achievers? We offer a free 3-day trial to the Becoming Legendary Platform.
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About the Author
Hersh Sandhoo is a multiple best-selling author and founder of Becoming Legendary. For over 20 years, he was the CEO of Webmation, a top strategic communication and web development firm that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in leads, sales, and cost savings for its clients. Nicknamed "100XDRAGON" for his insane work ethic, biohacking himself to sleep four and a half hours a night, 1:00 a.m. wake up time, personal transformations, dedication to family, and mastery of sales, marketing, product development and business operations.
Quickstart Course: Access a much more detailed course on Goal Centric Time Management. No charge or catches, you’ll have full access for 3 days when you register.
Millionaire Success Planner: You may have noticed from the images that I created my own planning system that utilizes all the concepts I just shared with you. Originally a one-page weekly and daily quarterly planner, I have coded an online version that I have been using for the past year. If you want to check it out, you can create a free account at becominglegendary.com. And if it appeals to you and you want to be part of a positive success driven community of achievers, I’d love to have you as a member.
And for reference, I personally designed and coded every line of code on the website on top of everything else I have been doing, including all the advanced areas like the store, members area, support tools, planner, metric tracking, community and user interface for mobile and desktop. So let me know what you think.
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