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If you want to accomplish something, you need to make time for it.
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If you never reserve time to work on your goal, you're leaving its completion to chance.
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And chance is not a particularly reliable productivity strategy.
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Are you ready to finally break free from overwhelm, procrastination, and burnout?
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If you're ready to focus on what truly matters and create momentum to reach and exceed your goals in business and in life, then this podcast is for you.
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Welcome to the Efficiency Advantage, the podcast where clarity meets action and purpose that fuels your progress.
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So here's world-class productivity expert and your host, Coach Julie.
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Welcome back to the Efficiency Advantage Podcast.
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I'm Julie Shulam, your host.
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So here we are, approaching the final quarter of the year, and I have a question for you.
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Do you remember the New Year's resolutions you made back in January?
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Not the ones you casually mentioned to someone at a party or a gathering.
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I mean the goals you genuinely intended to accomplish this year.
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The ones that mattered enough that you told yourself, this year I'm going to make this happen.
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Maybe you wanted to grow your business, get healthier, write a book, improve your finances, get organized, spend time with family, whatever it is.
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Now, here's the most important question: where do you stand with those goals today?
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If you don't know, you are not alone.
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Many people set goals at the beginning of the year, get swept up into the demands of everyday life, and don't revisit those goals until the end of December.
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Now that is when they suddenly realize that the year is basically over and the things they wanted most have been pushed aside.
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But we're not in December yet.
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We have an opportunity to do something about it.
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Today I want to talk to you about why evaluating your goals before the fourth quarter begins can be one of the most productive decisions you make all year.
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So we're going to look at how to assess what is working, what is not, what still matters, and how to use these final three months of this year to your advantage rather than arriving at the end of the year and wonder where the time went.
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So have you ever wondered why we wait until the end of the year?
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There's something about January that makes everything feel possible, right?
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We have a fresh calendar, a sense of renewal, and perhaps a little more motivation than we did maybe the end of the year.
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We imagine the person we want to become and the things we want to accomplish.
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And then, you know, life happens.
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The first quarter is busy, spring then arrives, summer brings vacations and family commitments and all kinds of changes in our lives and maybe some unexpected demands.
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And before we know it, some temper is here.
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The problem is not necessarily that we stopped caring about our goals, is that we stopped looking at them.
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When a goal is not visible in our daily or weekly decision making, it becomes very easy for the urgent to take precedence over the important.
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We respond to what is in front of us.
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We handle the emails and meetings and requests and kids and schedules and everything else that comes up that is demanding our attention.
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Meanwhile, the goal that mattered so much in January quietly moves further into the background.
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This is especially common with goals that do not have an external deadline.
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If you have a deliverable due Friday, you're probably going to make time for it.
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But if your goal is to write a book or improve your health or learn a language, then maybe, you know, if no one's standing over you asking when it's going to be completed, yeah, it waits.
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This is why you may hear often that goals need regular evaluation, because we need to know whether our intentions are actually moving us toward the things we say that we want.
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Now, one of the things I see frequently in my coaching practice is that people have very clear intentions, but they've not translated those intentions into an actual working plan.
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They say, I want to be more productive, or I want to get organized, or I want to have better balance in my life.
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Those are worthwhile aspirations, but they're not yet actionable.
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Until you define the outcome, it's difficult to determine whether you're making any progress.
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And even when the outcome is clear, there's another step.
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Deciding what you will actually do to achieve it.
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Maybe the resolution is I want to write a book this year.
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A plan might be, I will complete my manuscript by October 15th.
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Send it to my editor and reserve three writing sessions each week to make that happen.
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Do you see the difference?
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One is an intention, the other is actually a path or a plan.
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Now I'm not suggesting that every goal needs to be rigid or that life should be scheduled down to the minute.
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But if something is important enough to be a goal, it deserves a place in your calendar and in your decision-making process.
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Otherwise, it is competing with everything else in your life without any protection.
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September is a particularly useful time to conduct this kind of review because we are so close to the end of the year to feel that sense of urgency, but we still have enough time to make some changes.
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Three months is not an insignificant amount of time.
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Think about what can happen in 12 or 13 weeks.
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You can complete a substantial project, establish a new routine, make meaningful progress on a health goal, strengthen some important relationships.
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I mean, there's so many things that you can do that'll carry you into the next year.
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But these three months can also disappear remarkably quickly if you do not decide how you want to use them.
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And that is really the point of this episode.
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I don't want you to reach December 28th, look back at your January goals and say, oh my goodness, I completely forgot about that one.
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How great would it feel if you could say, I looked at where I was in September and I made some new decisions and used the final quarter intentionally.
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So here's a step-by-step game plan that you can follow.
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Step one, revisit what you actually wanted.
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The first thing I encourage you to do is to find the goals or resolution or resolutions, I'll get the word out, you wrote down at the beginning of the year.
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Now, if you did not write them down, that's okay.
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No harm, no foul.
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Take a few minutes to write them down.
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What did you hope would be different by the end of this year?
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What were you excited about?
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What did you want to change?
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And please do not immediately judge yourself as you read through them.
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You're gathering information.
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You're looking at what you intended, what has happened, and what you want to do next.
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For each goal, ask yourself, is this still important to me?
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You need to determine why you want it in the first place and have things, you know, changed that make it less relevant now, or perhaps even more relevant than it was in January.
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Sometimes we hold on to goals just because we made them.
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But circumstances do change and priorities change.
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We learn things about ourselves and our lives that we did not know at the beginning of the year.
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A goal that made sense in January may no longer be the right goal now, in this year, time of the year.
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And that's totally okay.
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There is a difference between abandoning something because it is difficult and making a thoughtful decision that it no longer serves you.
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The purpose of this review is not to force yourself to complete every resolution that you wrote down, it's to make sure that you're pursuing the right ones.
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Step two, assess your actual progress.
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Once you've identified the goals that still matter, take an objective look at where you stand.
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What have you accomplished so far?
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What progress have you made?
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Even if you've not reached the final outcome, you've probably done some work.
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So, what has been working and what has maybe gotten in the way?
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I want to emphasize something here.
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Progress is not always the same as completion.
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If your goal was to improve your health and you've been exercising more consistently, that counts, that matters, even if you've not reached the original target.
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If your goal is to grow your business and you've developed a new service or strengthened your network, improved systems and such, even if the revenue has not yet caught up, that's okay.
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If your goal is to learn a new language and you started a course to do so, you've not accomplished nothing.
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You started learning a new language.
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Now you adjust the goal to have more specificity around it.
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Sometimes people look only at the final result and overlook the work that has already been done.
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That can create unnecessary discouragement and make it harder to continue.
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At the same time, we need to be willing to acknowledge when we have not made progress.
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If you haven't touched a goal since February, you know, acknowledge that.
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Not with shame, but with accuracy.
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You cannot make a useful plan based on an inaccurate assessment.
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Step three, identify what got in the way.
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This is where evaluation becomes especially valuable.
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Rather than simply saying, I need to try harder, ask yourself, what actually got in the way?
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What prevented you from making progress?
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Was the goal maybe too vague, or did you underestimate how much time it would take to get that accomplished?
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Or did you take on maybe just too many things altogether?
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This is very different from lacking motivation.
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I often work with clients who have more than enough motivation.
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They have wonderful ideas, ambitious goals, and a genuine desire to accomplish them.
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What they did not have is a realistic structure for making those things happen.
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So step four, decide what is realistic for Q4.
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Now we get to the part that can really change the trajectory of your year.
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Look at the goals that still matter and ask what I can realistically accomplish between October 1st and December 31st.
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Notice that I said realistically, this is not the time to take every unfinished goal from January and cram it into the final quarter.
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This will not go well, and you might just become overwhelmed and totally disappointed.
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Instead, choose the goals that will have the highest and greatest impact that you can reasonably move forward with in the time available.
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Keep in mind, sometimes the most productive decision is to remove a goal from your list altogether.
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Maybe it's next year's goal.
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Step five, work backward from December.
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Once you've selected the priorities and goals you want to achieve, then you want to work backward.
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Imagine it's December 31st.
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What would you like to be able to say you accomplished during the final quarter?
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Now be specific.
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Instead of I made progress on learning a language, perhaps it is I completed the second level of the course.
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Instead of I got healthier, perhaps it's I established a consistent exercise routine and scheduled the medical appointments I'd been putting off.
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Instead of I got more organized, perhaps it's I organized the entire garage.
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Then ask yourself, what needs to be completed by the end of November?
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And what needs to happen in October?
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And then what needs to happen this week?
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You want to break it down.
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This is where the goal becomes doable.
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A large goal can often feel overwhelming because we're looking at the entire distance between where we are and where we want to be.
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But when we break it into smaller milestones, we can identify the next action.
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And the next action is what matters most.
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You do not have to complete the entire goal today.
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You just have to know what you're doing today that moves you toward it.
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Now, I have to say something that probably will not surprise anyone who listens to this podcast regularly.
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If you want to accomplish something, you need to make time for it.
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If you never reserve time to work on your goal, you're leaving its completion to chance.
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And chance is not a particularly reliable productivity strategy.
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Look at your calendar.
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Where will the tasks happen?
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What days and times are realistic?
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What existing commitments might need to be reduced, delegated, or eliminated to create the necessary capacity to do this new thing.
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This is especially important as we approach the holiday season.
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November and December often bring additional personal and professional demands.
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All those extra commitments can consume more time than we anticipate.
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So plan accordingly.
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If you know that December will be unusually busy, do not create a new plan for this goal that assumes you will have the same availability in December that you may have in October.
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Plan around the life you actually have, not the imaginary calendar you wish you had.
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All right, finally, build in a weekly review.
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One of the most effective ways to prevent your goals from disappearing again.
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Establish a simple weekly review.
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This can be done in 15 to 20 minutes tops.
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At the end of each week, just ask yourself, what did I accomplish?
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What did I intend to do but didn't do?
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What got in the way, and maybe what needs to happen next week.
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Then look at your calendar and make sure you have a place for it.
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If you need to make an adjustment, this is the time to do so.
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Not everything goes exactly according to plan.
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Knowing when to pivot is the secret behind this success.
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Be careful not to criticize yourself here or at any point in the process, really.
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That kind of thinking rarely helps.
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There may be legitimate reasons you did not make the progress you expected.
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Perhaps you experienced a major life change or a health issue or a new family responsibility or a shift in your business.
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Perhaps you simply misjudged what was possible.
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Just learn from that information and don't use it as evidence that you are incapable.
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Don't overlook what you actually accomplished along the way, too.
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All right, so here is what you can do before October begins.
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One, set aside some uninterrupted time to review your year's goals.
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Pull out the list you made in January or write down what you remember.
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Two, identify what still matters.
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Acknowledge what you've already achieved and look honestly at what has not happened and why.
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Three, choose a small number of priorities for the final three months of the year.
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Four, define what success would look like by December 31st.
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Then break those priorities into monthly and weekly milestones and schedule the time necessary to work on those.
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And five, perhaps the most important, decide what you're willing to stop doing or do less of to make room for what matters.
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Because we can't continue adding new things into our schedule without considering the capacity required to fulfill them.
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The end of the year has a way of arriving whether we're ready for it or not.
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But you do not have to wait until December to find out how the year turned out.
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So before Q4 begins, take a look at your goals.
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Give yourself the opportunity to finish the year with purpose because it will be much more fun to celebrate in December your accomplishments versus discovering what you forgot to even pursue.
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I'm Julie Shulem and this is the Efficiency Advantage Podcast.
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Remember, productivity is not about doing more for the sake of doing more.
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It's about making the most of your time and energy so you can create the life and work you actually want.
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Please subscribe, like, follow, and share with others, and head on over to my YouTube channel where the video version of all the podcasts to date are available there now as well.
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Drop a comment, share your goal for this final quarter of the year, and let's see how we can make this year amazing.
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Until next time, have a productive day.
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So that's it for today's episode of the Efficiency Advantage.
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Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show.
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One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a private VIP day with Coach Julie herself.
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Be sure to head on over to the EfficiencyAdvantage.com and pick up a free copy of Coach Julie's gift.
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And join us on the next episode.
00:00:00.239 --> 00:00:03.439
If you want to accomplish something, you need to make time for it.
00:00:03.680 --> 00:00:08.720
If you never reserve time to work on your goal, you're leaving its completion to chance.
00:00:08.880 --> 00:00:13.039
And chance is not a particularly reliable productivity strategy.
00:00:14.320 --> 00:00:20.480
Are you ready to finally break free from overwhelm, procrastination, and burnout?
00:00:20.719 --> 00:00:31.600
If you're ready to focus on what truly matters and create momentum to reach and exceed your goals in business and in life, then this podcast is for you.
00:00:31.839 --> 00:00:40.880
Welcome to the Efficiency Advantage, the podcast where clarity meets action and purpose that fuels your progress.
00:00:41.280 --> 00:00:48.479
So here's world-class productivity expert and your host, Coach Julie.
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Welcome back to the Efficiency Advantage Podcast.
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I'm Julie Shulam, your host.
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So here we are, approaching the final quarter of the year, and I have a question for you.
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Do you remember the New Year's resolutions you made back in January?
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Not the ones you casually mentioned to someone at a party or a gathering.
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I mean the goals you genuinely intended to accomplish this year.
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The ones that mattered enough that you told yourself, this year I'm going to make this happen.
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Maybe you wanted to grow your business, get healthier, write a book, improve your finances, get organized, spend time with family, whatever it is.
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Now, here's the most important question: where do you stand with those goals today?
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If you don't know, you are not alone.
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Many people set goals at the beginning of the year, get swept up into the demands of everyday life, and don't revisit those goals until the end of December.
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Now that is when they suddenly realize that the year is basically over and the things they wanted most have been pushed aside.
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But we're not in December yet.
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We have an opportunity to do something about it.
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Today I want to talk to you about why evaluating your goals before the fourth quarter begins can be one of the most productive decisions you make all year.
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So we're going to look at how to assess what is working, what is not, what still matters, and how to use these final three months of this year to your advantage rather than arriving at the end of the year and wonder where the time went.
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So have you ever wondered why we wait until the end of the year?
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There's something about January that makes everything feel possible, right?
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We have a fresh calendar, a sense of renewal, and perhaps a little more motivation than we did maybe the end of the year.
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We imagine the person we want to become and the things we want to accomplish.
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And then, you know, life happens.
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The first quarter is busy, spring then arrives, summer brings vacations and family commitments and all kinds of changes in our lives and maybe some unexpected demands.
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And before we know it, some temper is here.
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The problem is not necessarily that we stopped caring about our goals, is that we stopped looking at them.
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When a goal is not visible in our daily or weekly decision making, it becomes very easy for the urgent to take precedence over the important.
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We respond to what is in front of us.
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We handle the emails and meetings and requests and kids and schedules and everything else that comes up that is demanding our attention.
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Meanwhile, the goal that mattered so much in January quietly moves further into the background.
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This is especially common with goals that do not have an external deadline.
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If you have a deliverable due Friday, you're probably going to make time for it.
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But if your goal is to write a book or improve your health or learn a language, then maybe, you know, if no one's standing over you asking when it's going to be completed, yeah, it waits.
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This is why you may hear often that goals need regular evaluation, because we need to know whether our intentions are actually moving us toward the things we say that we want.
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Now, one of the things I see frequently in my coaching practice is that people have very clear intentions, but they've not translated those intentions into an actual working plan.
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They say, I want to be more productive, or I want to get organized, or I want to have better balance in my life.
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Those are worthwhile aspirations, but they're not yet actionable.
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Until you define the outcome, it's difficult to determine whether you're making any progress.
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And even when the outcome is clear, there's another step.
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Deciding what you will actually do to achieve it.
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Maybe the resolution is I want to write a book this year.
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A plan might be, I will complete my manuscript by October 15th.
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Send it to my editor and reserve three writing sessions each week to make that happen.
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Do you see the difference?
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One is an intention, the other is actually a path or a plan.
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Now I'm not suggesting that every goal needs to be rigid or that life should be scheduled down to the minute.
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But if something is important enough to be a goal, it deserves a place in your calendar and in your decision-making process.
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Otherwise, it is competing with everything else in your life without any protection.
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September is a particularly useful time to conduct this kind of review because we are so close to the end of the year to feel that sense of urgency, but we still have enough time to make some changes.
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Three months is not an insignificant amount of time.
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Think about what can happen in 12 or 13 weeks.
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You can complete a substantial project, establish a new routine, make meaningful progress on a health goal, strengthen some important relationships.
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I mean, there's so many things that you can do that'll carry you into the next year.
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But these three months can also disappear remarkably quickly if you do not decide how you want to use them.
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And that is really the point of this episode.
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I don't want you to reach December 28th, look back at your January goals and say, oh my goodness, I completely forgot about that one.
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How great would it feel if you could say, I looked at where I was in September and I made some new decisions and used the final quarter intentionally.
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So here's a step-by-step game plan that you can follow.
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Step one, revisit what you actually wanted.
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The first thing I encourage you to do is to find the goals or resolution or resolutions, I'll get the word out, you wrote down at the beginning of the year.
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Now, if you did not write them down, that's okay.
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No harm, no foul.
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Take a few minutes to write them down.
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What did you hope would be different by the end of this year?
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What were you excited about?
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What did you want to change?
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And please do not immediately judge yourself as you read through them.
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You're gathering information.
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You're looking at what you intended, what has happened, and what you want to do next.
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For each goal, ask yourself, is this still important to me?
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You need to determine why you want it in the first place and have things, you know, changed that make it less relevant now, or perhaps even more relevant than it was in January.
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Sometimes we hold on to goals just because we made them.
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But circumstances do change and priorities change.
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We learn things about ourselves and our lives that we did not know at the beginning of the year.
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A goal that made sense in January may no longer be the right goal now, in this year, time of the year.
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And that's totally okay.
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There is a difference between abandoning something because it is difficult and making a thoughtful decision that it no longer serves you.
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The purpose of this review is not to force yourself to complete every resolution that you wrote down, it's to make sure that you're pursuing the right ones.
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Step two, assess your actual progress.
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Once you've identified the goals that still matter, take an objective look at where you stand.
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What have you accomplished so far?
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What progress have you made?
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Even if you've not reached the final outcome, you've probably done some work.
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So, what has been working and what has maybe gotten in the way?
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I want to emphasize something here.
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Progress is not always the same as completion.
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If your goal was to improve your health and you've been exercising more consistently, that counts, that matters, even if you've not reached the original target.
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If your goal is to grow your business and you've developed a new service or strengthened your network, improved systems and such, even if the revenue has not yet caught up, that's okay.
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If your goal is to learn a new language and you started a course to do so, you've not accomplished nothing.
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You started learning a new language.
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Now you adjust the goal to have more specificity around it.
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Sometimes people look only at the final result and overlook the work that has already been done.
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That can create unnecessary discouragement and make it harder to continue.
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At the same time, we need to be willing to acknowledge when we have not made progress.
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If you haven't touched a goal since February, you know, acknowledge that.
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Not with shame, but with accuracy.
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You cannot make a useful plan based on an inaccurate assessment.
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Step three, identify what got in the way.
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This is where evaluation becomes especially valuable.
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Rather than simply saying, I need to try harder, ask yourself, what actually got in the way?
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What prevented you from making progress?
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Was the goal maybe too vague, or did you underestimate how much time it would take to get that accomplished?
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Or did you take on maybe just too many things altogether?
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This is very different from lacking motivation.
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I often work with clients who have more than enough motivation.
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They have wonderful ideas, ambitious goals, and a genuine desire to accomplish them.
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What they did not have is a realistic structure for making those things happen.
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So step four, decide what is realistic for Q4.
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Now we get to the part that can really change the trajectory of your year.
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Look at the goals that still matter and ask what I can realistically accomplish between October 1st and December 31st.
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Notice that I said realistically, this is not the time to take every unfinished goal from January and cram it into the final quarter.
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This will not go well, and you might just become overwhelmed and totally disappointed.
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Instead, choose the goals that will have the highest and greatest impact that you can reasonably move forward with in the time available.
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Keep in mind, sometimes the most productive decision is to remove a goal from your list altogether.
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Maybe it's next year's goal.
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Step five, work backward from December.
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Once you've selected the priorities and goals you want to achieve, then you want to work backward.
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Imagine it's December 31st.
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What would you like to be able to say you accomplished during the final quarter?
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Now be specific.
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Instead of I made progress on learning a language, perhaps it is I completed the second level of the course.
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Instead of I got healthier, perhaps it's I established a consistent exercise routine and scheduled the medical appointments I'd been putting off.
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Instead of I got more organized, perhaps it's I organized the entire garage.
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Then ask yourself, what needs to be completed by the end of November?
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And what needs to happen in October?
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And then what needs to happen this week?
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You want to break it down.
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This is where the goal becomes doable.
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A large goal can often feel overwhelming because we're looking at the entire distance between where we are and where we want to be.
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But when we break it into smaller milestones, we can identify the next action.
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And the next action is what matters most.
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You do not have to complete the entire goal today.
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You just have to know what you're doing today that moves you toward it.
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Now, I have to say something that probably will not surprise anyone who listens to this podcast regularly.
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If you want to accomplish something, you need to make time for it.
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If you never reserve time to work on your goal, you're leaving its completion to chance.
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And chance is not a particularly reliable productivity strategy.
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Look at your calendar.
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Where will the tasks happen?
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What days and times are realistic?
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What existing commitments might need to be reduced, delegated, or eliminated to create the necessary capacity to do this new thing.
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This is especially important as we approach the holiday season.
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November and December often bring additional personal and professional demands.
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All those extra commitments can consume more time than we anticipate.
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So plan accordingly.
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If you know that December will be unusually busy, do not create a new plan for this goal that assumes you will have the same availability in December that you may have in October.
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Plan around the life you actually have, not the imaginary calendar you wish you had.
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All right, finally, build in a weekly review.
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One of the most effective ways to prevent your goals from disappearing again.
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Establish a simple weekly review.
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This can be done in 15 to 20 minutes tops.
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At the end of each week, just ask yourself, what did I accomplish?
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What did I intend to do but didn't do?
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What got in the way, and maybe what needs to happen next week.
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Then look at your calendar and make sure you have a place for it.
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If you need to make an adjustment, this is the time to do so.
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Not everything goes exactly according to plan.
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Knowing when to pivot is the secret behind this success.
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Be careful not to criticize yourself here or at any point in the process, really.
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That kind of thinking rarely helps.
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There may be legitimate reasons you did not make the progress you expected.
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Perhaps you experienced a major life change or a health issue or a new family responsibility or a shift in your business.
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Perhaps you simply misjudged what was possible.
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Just learn from that information and don't use it as evidence that you are incapable.
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Don't overlook what you actually accomplished along the way, too.
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All right, so here is what you can do before October begins.
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One, set aside some uninterrupted time to review your year's goals.
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Pull out the list you made in January or write down what you remember.
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Two, identify what still matters.
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Acknowledge what you've already achieved and look honestly at what has not happened and why.
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Three, choose a small number of priorities for the final three months of the year.
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Four, define what success would look like by December 31st.
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Then break those priorities into monthly and weekly milestones and schedule the time necessary to work on those.
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And five, perhaps the most important, decide what you're willing to stop doing or do less of to make room for what matters.
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Because we can't continue adding new things into our schedule without considering the capacity required to fulfill them.
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The end of the year has a way of arriving whether we're ready for it or not.
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But you do not have to wait until December to find out how the year turned out.
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So before Q4 begins, take a look at your goals.
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Give yourself the opportunity to finish the year with purpose because it will be much more fun to celebrate in December your accomplishments versus discovering what you forgot to even pursue.
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I'm Julie Shulem and this is the Efficiency Advantage Podcast.
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Remember, productivity is not about doing more for the sake of doing more.
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It's about making the most of your time and energy so you can create the life and work you actually want.
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Please subscribe, like, follow, and share with others, and head on over to my YouTube channel where the video version of all the podcasts to date are available there now as well.
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Drop a comment, share your goal for this final quarter of the year, and let's see how we can make this year amazing.
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Until next time, have a productive day.
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So that's it for today's episode of the Efficiency Advantage.
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Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show.
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One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a private VIP day with Coach Julie herself.
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Be sure to head on over to the EfficiencyAdvantage.com and pick up a free copy of Coach Julie's gift.
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And join us on the next episode.
