If you want to achieve success and sustain personal development, structuring how you work is a must. Setting daily goals makes it more likely that you achieve your long-term goals. Without these mini-goals driving how you spend your days, you may find yourself distracted and wasting time on low-value work, social media, and other people's priorities.
Daily goals force you to invest in productivity and time management techniques that help you make the most of your time and accrue consistent, incremental progress toward specific goals. In this article, we'll share benefits, examples, and tips to help you set daily goals and make self-improvement a habit.
Benefits of Daily Goal-Setting
Setting achievable daily goals increases your personal productivity and enhances your work performance. It also helps with:
- Building consistency: Setting daily goals is an excellent way to break bad habits and develop good ones. You don't need to be 100% perfect at completing every task, but if you accomplish even a portion of what you set out to do, you make progress every day.
- Increasing awareness: Daily goals bring a kind of "present" awareness into how you spend time. Days don't pass by in a haze without you being able to remember what you did. When you have daily goals, you are more aware of what has been done and what you still need to do.
- Improving wellbeing: As you achieve small goals, you gain confidence to complete your larger goals. Being consistent with daily tasks also creates feelings of self-efficacy. This can positively impact motivation to work, so you can accomplish more while maintaining work-life balance.
- Overcoming procrastination: With an action plan for each day, you're more likely to overcome procrastination and get meaningful work done. A daily schedule helps with prioritizing work that matters and declutters your mind, reducing mental fatigue.
5 Ways to Set Yourself up for Success With Daily Goals
According to writer Annie Dillard, a schedule is a “net for catching days.” Daily goals help structure a daily routine and set you up for success. Practice the five habits below to begin setting and meeting practical daily goals that bring you closer to your ideal life and career.
1. Break Down Big Goals
Daily goals should be created from your bigger goals. Before getting granular with planning daily tasks, first create an outline for the year, month, or week. This would be your yearly, monthly, or weekly work plan.
Then, go ahead and structure these big goals and plans into daily to-dos you can manage in synchrony with your other work and home responsibilities. You may choose to do this in one weekly planning session or at the end of each day in preparation for the next day.
Weigh important tasks against urgent responsibilities, and balance each day with both long-term and short-term goals.
Let's look at an example of what this might look like:
Say one of your career goals is to make a lateral move within your organization. How can you ensure you're making progress toward this on a daily basis? You have to take care of your current work duties while making time to learn new skills and reposition yourself.
To achieve this in the timeline you've set, you must break the big goal into smaller goals you can tackle in bits. Your mini-goals for this project may include:
- Identifying essential requirements for the new role
- Speaking to your manager or HR about your plans
- Investing in learning and professional development to prepare you for the new role
- Seeking a mentor or sponsor at your company
Once your mini-goals are laid out, divide them into daily tasks to maintain progress and accountability. Every single day, you must cross off your planned task for that day to get closer to achieving your goal and attaining your new role.
2. Set SMART Daily Goals
Setting goals you can't manage is a sure path to burnout, demotivation, and frustration. It's wise instead to set SMART goals, which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. SMART goals keep you within your capacity while still making progress. You can develop the habit of setting SMART goals following the framework below:
- Specific: Your goals should target a specific area of improvement or tackle a specific need.
- Measurable: Your goals should be quantifiable or allow for measurable progress.
- Attainable: Your goals should be realistic and attainable. Think about the resources you have available and any existing constraints.
- Relevant: Your daily goals should align with your other responsibilities, deadlines, and milestones.
- Time-bound: Your goals should have a defined end to let you know when it's complete.
3. Create and Follow a Productivity System That Works for You
It's one thing to plan your goals and tasks and another thing to make yourself follow through and complete them. Most people procrastinate even when their schedules are overflowing with work and personal goals.
Productivity systems help create a process for handling your tasks. When you set up a productivity system, you no longer have to rely on willpower alone but instead know what to do at different times. Productivity systems help you achieve your daily goals and reduce friction when switching between tasks, conserving mental energy.
4. Complete Your Most Important Tasks Early in the Day
The first hours of each day are critical. What you do during this time can affect your energy and motivation for the rest of the day. Focusing on your most important tasks early in the day frees you to do other things later. It also declutters your mind, making you less anxious and more productive overall.
This tactic may be the domino effect you need to bulldoze through all your tasks in a day, or it may simply be a way to ensure you do the things that matter most to you before time gets away. Prioritizing and completing your important tasks early helps overcome procrastination and can put you ahead of the curve when it comes to achieving big goals.
5. Manage Your Energy Throughout the Day
All your good habits and time management strategies are useless if you’re unable to manage your mind and energy during the day. Low mental and physical energy leads to a lack of focus and decreasing work performance.
Everyone's energy fluctuates throughout the day. So, it's crucial that you study your habits and moods to understand yours. For early birds, their energy peaks in the morning and dips in the afternoon, often leading to an afternoon slump.
Monitor your energy to understand how your body works best and plan your daily goals in order of priority around your peak productivity hours. You can use quantified self-knowledge to plan your daily schedule optimally. Tackle important work when you have the most energy and low-value tasks during low-peak hours.
Track Daily Goals and Tasks With Rize
Achieving your life's goals requires an intentional approach to how you spend your time. Setting and working with daily goals doesn't come easy to everyone, but if you spend the time to build a productivity system that works for you, it pays exponential rewards and helps you accomplish more than you may think is possible.
Take your daily goal-setting up a notch by tracking your productivity level and focus while working on different tasks. Rize, a smart and automatic time-tracking app, helps you understand how you spend each workday, what tasks take most of your time, when your focus falters, and when you need a break.
All this data comes in handy if you want to plan effective daily goals, manage your energy better, and maintain consistency toward achieving the things that matter to you. Are you ready to take charge of your days and time? Get started today with a two-week free trial of Rize.
