Gaining Home Online Business Success with Effective Goal Planning
These days, to start a home business has been a great way to earn some extra money or even give up the day job completely. Yes, this is a good situation: Being able to be your own boss and to be able to decide how much you earn, what hours you work and when you can take a holiday. But at the same time, the trouble is, it doesn’t always turn out that way.
So, I am writing this post to help you increase the chance of succeeding in your online business whatever that may be by having a simple but effective approach to goal planning.
I guess you may have heard of the saying ‘he who fails to plan is planning to fail’. This phrase was used in a critical life or death situation in both cases. I am not suggesting that an online business opportunity falls into the quite the same category but an online business can either improve or be detrimental to your life in that it can provide you with more money or even long term financial security or it can waste your time, money and effort and lead to frustration and stress. The difference between the two outcomes is planning. Success comes from planning, Stress comes from the unexpected events that knock you sideways and leave you worrying what is going to happen next. But how do we plan effectively?
Speaking of making the plan more effective, one of the problems that many people have when starting any kind of business is actually outlining at the very start what the objective is. What we are saying here is ‘What is our goal?’ Following on from this we need to understand what will be judged as a success. In essence we are talking about success criteria for our goal. The next stage will be to identify all the things that need to get done in order to achieve the goal. These are the tasks. Some tasks are more complex than others however and we should understand that at the outset. So we can see a structure emerging here that we can use to our advantage. If we understand what the goal is and have defined success criteria then we can also identify the tasks related to achieving the goal. Now we can actually measure progress. How cool is that?
One of the big things that gets in the way of people achieving their goals is a lack of focus and motivation. The daily routine of life like work, family and finances rightly demand our attention and sometimes we become momentarily distracted from our goals and take our eyes of the ball. Every now and then a major diversion comes along and people may never achieve what they set out to do. This is a real shame as all that time, energy and money is wasted and the goal is never realised.
People who take the time to write down their goals, success criteria and tasks related to those goals are known to have a much higher chance of success. In a study at Harvard Business School a group of students were asked if they had goals and had written them down. The study found that 3% had goals and had written them down along with a plan to achieve their goals. 13% had goals but had not written them down. 84% did not have goals at all. Ten years later the same group were questioned about their successes in life. The 13% of the group who had goals were earning on average twice as much as the 84% group who had no goals. The 3% group who had goals and had a goal plan were earning 10 times as much as the other 97% put together. Now that is pretty convincing to me and if you want to invest your time wisely then get some goals, write them down and identify all the tasks you need to complete in order to achieve your goal. Do that consistently over time and you will achieve your goal. It is as simple as that.
Have you got 20 minutes each day to spend on your goal plan? If the answer is not, I suggest that you make that time as it will be time well spent.