What was your biggest failure in 2014?
That’s a strange question. Isn’t it? But it is in fact a very important question; a question that you should all ask yourselves. If you have only been cherishing your successes and never spent a few hours to critically evaluate your failures, you are over-looking a lot of aspects that could be prospective successes and big wins for you.
So, take some time out and evaluate on your biggest failures for the year.
The year 2014 saw a lot of ups and downs at my blog here. When I started the year, my sole objective was to rejuvenate this blog and bring it back to the state where it was about 2 years back. As I look back and assess my performance, I have more reasons to be unhappy because the objective still remains unfulfilled.
There were a lot of things that I had planned – on every aspects like social media presence, promotions, guest posting, newer sections etc. But only about 10% of that was accomplished in the year.
What went wrong and why did I fail?
Blogging Mistakes – The Effects of Goal Less Blogging
Didn’t I have a goal for my blog?
In fact I had. I started off the year with a single goal. Take it where it was in 2012, in terms of its circulation. That was a real goal. Wasn’t that?
It is here that I went wrong. This was the first and my biggest mistake in blogging.
BLOGGING MISTAKE # 1 :
There is a lot of difference in a goal and a concrete goal. Unless you have a concrete target on what you want to achieve, it is very difficult that you will reach there.
The mistake I did was that I set a goal, which was a vague one. Instead of setting a goal saying, “I will take my blog to where it was in 2012, in terms of circulation”, I should rather have set a goal saying, “I will improve the pageviews of my blog to xxxxx/day”. It would have been a concrete one which would then have helped me break it down into small targets that I could go after.
MISTAKE # 2 :
I was extremely focused when I started the year and I used to spend about a couple of hours every day on the blog. But as days passed, I got overwhelmed with a lot of things. About 147 domain names that I had to dispose off, about 20 niche blogs that still required some work, 4 video courses that were still in production and many more such things.. all cried for attention and the focus gradually decreased.
Why did I lose FOCUS?
I had read a book some time back (I think it was “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“) where the author had mentioned something about “writing down your goals“. It is so easy to forget things. That point was something I had underlined in the book. While I implemented it at a lot of places, I just forgot it, when it mattered the most.
Always Write Down Your Goals.
If you haven’t yet written down your goals, it is high time you do it. Go Ahead and do it right away.
MISTAKE # 3 :
When I started the year, I knew WHAT I had to do with my blog. But there was something that I missed. It was the “HOW”.
While it is important that you have a concrete goal and you also write it down, it is also important that you have a detailed plan on how you will achieve it. There are called as targets and achieving each of these targets will take you closer to your goal.
Just as it is important to write down your goals, it is also important that you write down the broken down targets as well. Also put a date against it, so that you have a deadline to achieve it.
The best part about putting a date against each of the target is that you will know by when you want to achieve it. That ways you will not deviate from your goals and the FOCUS remains.
GoalsonTrack – A Tool to Help You Remain Focused
Excel Spreadsheets have been my best friend. Thanks to all the analytics and data management that I used to do when I started off with my regular job, I knew how to play around with excel files. With MS-Office 2013 simplifying creating dashboards, I found MS-Excel to be the best tool to keep a track of a lot of my online activities.
But excel had its own limitations and there was a lot of tweaks required to get it to even 80% of how I wanted my dashboard to look. And I know, for somebody who is not proficient with excel, it will be a herculean task to create a similar dashboard.
I wanted a simpler tool that had everything that I wanted and yet was easy to use so that 2015 does not turn out to be like that of 2014. I wanted a complete tool that could keep me focused and could help me in goal setting and tracking.
That was when one of my friends introduced me to GoalsonTrack. After a month of using it, I can only say that it is probably the best tool that you can ever get, if you want to stay focused.
GoalsonTrack has some amazing features. Some of these features are difficult to incorporate into a spreadsheet and that is where this tool scores over every other such similar tool.
Just check out some of the features of GoalsonTrack –
Goal Creation
With GoalsonTrack, goal creation is extremely easy. You can create SMART goals, break it down into smaller targets and see instant progress on your tasks. By breaking your goals into smaller tasks, it becomes easier to go after them. And the tracking feature ensures that you are on goal. It also has a lot of goal templates and action plans which can serve as a starting point in your planning.
To-Do List
GoalsonTrack has a very beautiful way of organizing your to-do list. The tool automatically organizes your tasks into categories and days. The drag-and-drop feature makes organizing, extremely simple.
You can also track the amount of time you spend on each of the tasks using animated and offline time trackers. And the printable day-planner makes it easy to take all your to-do list with you.
Visualization
In order to succeed at your goals, it is important that you have clear visualization for each of your goals. GoalsonTrack makes it easy to create visualizations. You can upload your own pictures to put your dreams in front of your eyes in a visual format.
Habits Builder Tool
This is one of the best tools I liked the most in GoalsonTrack. The Habits Builder helps you build a habit by tracking the frequency of the action by placing checkmarks on the habits builder calendar tool.
In addition to all of these, there are other handy features like the goal journals, options to share your goals and accomplishments, data syncing with most calendars and 3D chart creation etc. They also have a nice little Mobile APP which helps you use the tool on your mobile phone and iPad as well.
Watch the below video to know more about the features –
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If you are serious about your business and don’t want to lose focus from your goals, I would recommend that you get GoalsonTrack for yourselves.