My Goal Setting Process

I'm religious about setting goals for not only my businesses but also my personal life. When you don't have a boss, accountability is important and tracking goals is an essential way to make sure you're staying on track and correcting yourself when things go wrong. I'm particularly focused on goals this year because I've got a lot going on:

My wife and I are having a kid in March
We're moving from California to Michigan and then from Michigan to Georgia
I'm running multiple businesses and launching at least 1 other this year

I'm afraid that I might wake up in December and have no idea what happened to the year. I want to remain present with our newborn and enjoy that as much as possible. However, as an entrepreneur, you can't afford to let your foot completely off the gas.

Over the past 3-4 years, I've built a goal creation and tracking process for myself. Here's the system I use:

Side note: As I wrote this, I realize I may be insane. Please reassure me and tell me that other people find goal setting as important as I do.....

I set my longer-term goals (10 years and 3 years).

I update the goals every year, but they shouldn't need a ton of adjustments. These goals cover a high-level view of what I want my life to look like and include business, net worth, family, vacations, etc. At the end of the year, I review the progress I made towards reaching these goals.

I set my 1 year goals.

‍These are all quantifiable goals focused on three main categories (Professional, Personal, Family). I used to do more categories, but I've found it's easier to put any subcategories into the main categories.

From the annual goals, I build quarterly goals.

These break down the annual goals into what I want to accomplish during the next quarter. Importantly, I review these quarterly goals every single Friday to judge how I'm tracking to the quarterly goals I've set. It's a great reminder to focus on the big things. At the end of each quarter, I create a new sheet and update the goals for the next quarter. This allows me to adjust the goals based on what happened in the prior quarter.

Build Daily Habit Tracker.

Finally, I take any goals that are habits I want to adjust and build a daily habit tracker to track whether or not I'm completing the daily habits that make certain goals happen. This allows me to track the percentage of days that I completed the habits. For example, the daily habits I'm tracking this year are: