About Goals

bypisicamov

135 followers

12 years ago

Since I'm here and while I learn I think, I'll just take advantage of this blog and post twice today. As you see, I'm more motivational-inclined; the technical part, it's easier to get help with, since the questions are more to the point.

Everybody speaks of goals.

I find it difficult to establish goals, or at least not in a time-related way. It's hard for me to say "I will be making 1000$ per month after 6 months" because I simply don't know enough about the dynamics of these things: webpages and their traffic, money in general, money in particular to my niche, etc. These are the problems of a beginner, and they apply to many people.

What works for me is to establish goals without a deadline: I want to do this, and when it is done I will continue with that.

Like this, I keep my work and learning organized by always knowing where to go next, but I also allow myself the time to navigate at my leisure outside of WA, like learning my niche, keeping up my social network and complementing what I learn here with code, marketing, and other stuff on the side. This is best done without being continuously pressed by a deadline.

Of course, everybody knows, if you give up the deadlines, you will procrastinate. It's even harder not to when you go to work 9h a day. Actually, that helps, because it gives structure to your schedule, and you can build upon that structure.

This is the best way not to procrastinate and to keep a steady progress: think of a schedule that works for you and that is easy to keep up, and then you only need to plan it once; after that, it will maintain itself.

What I do is I try to have the time to work on it and really think about what I'm doing, so 30min everyday wouldn't cut it. 30min is just about the time to write a post and its keywords; it might take even more. So if I have 30min a day, I could write a post everyday, OR I can do better posts and save them as drafts, and publish them 3-4 times a week, which is more than enough for your first page.

Keep your 30min everyday by deciding when and sticking to that: just before bed, or in the morning when noone is awake in the house, or after your morning jog, but commit to the idea that that part of your day will always be taken.

And since posting is not enough, and this probably doesn't stop when you stop being a beginner, you always have to learn, keep yourself up to date, and expand. I start over the weekend checking and answering messages everywhere, on with the next course at WA, during that I find an issue or another that I then fix, I spend some time with the community here, and then I finish by going crazy on the web looking for stuff I like or am curious about, so I'm never fresh out of ideas. And this should be a time when you do what you like, not working, so try not to look at the watch and be relaxed.

I'm sure this is the beginner's point of view, later on your website will have bigger priority and you'll have the routines ready, but I still hope this helps at least some of you!