Commit to Your Goals On Your Calendar
Have you ever felt the sting of failing to reach an important goal? You made a determined effort, but it wasn’t enough. Your carefully made plan of action fell apart and you just don’t have the energy to bring it back to life.
The best way to achieve goals is to regularly and deliberately practice towards your goal. If your goal is writing a book, commit to writing every day. Or, if you want to enhance your family relationship, deliberately practice spending more time with them. The key to success here is to stay consistent, purposeful and systematic. Getting things done and making progress on a regular basis, however, is where the rubber hits the road. At first, we are all committed and determined, and for a while it seems to work, but then the unexpected happens (which it always does). You can’t go to the gym at the scheduled time, or you get so busy during the week that you end up spending zero time on your goal of writing a book. So, you miss a session of working on your goal, and it becomes even easier to miss the second session. Before you know it, it’s a long time since you last worked towards your goal. The problem here is that you need to actively and consciously budget time for your goal. And, that’s a lot of hard work especially for busy people.
To stay committed and consistent, you need a flexible plan that actually works. When the unexpected occurs, your plan must be flexible and agile enough to cater for the change. SkedPal makes this process easier by helping you maintain your time-budget in a flexible and agile schedule. In other words, if things don’t go according to the preset schedule, a fresh new and carefully made schedule is rebuilt for you instantly. SkedPal’s Fuzzy Planning can help you stay committed to your goals by adding some flexibility to your calendar. So, if you missed the scheduled time for your goal’s deliberate practice, you don’t have to forget it. It shifts to an alternative time. What enables this flexibility in SkedPal is the way you define your intentions. In conventional calendars — which have been around for ages — you can add your events at specific times. For example, in Google calendar, you can set an appointment to repeat every week on certain days, and at a fixed hour in the day. In SkedPal, the intentions are more aligned with how we actually intend to do something. Our intentions have less specific reference to time. We normally think of doing something ‘sometime this week’, or ‘sometime this afternoon’. Research shows that planning with this flexibility in mind reduces the stress in getting things done.