How to Effectively Achieve Your 90-Day Goals

Do you have big ideas but don’t know where to start? Have you ever set a goal but failed to follow through? The 90-day goal-setting method might be the solution for you. By focusing on clarity and time management, this approach helps entrepreneurs, freelancers, and professionals tackle ambitious projects effectively. In this article, I’ll share the steps to achieve your 90-day goals, offering actionable tips to turn your vision into reality in just three months.

The 90-Day Goal Strategy for Effective Time Management

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan, and guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” JIM ROHN

Why are 90 days more productive than 6 months or even 1 year? After all, developing a major project takes time and 90 days could be short. Like the seasons that also work in cycles, this strategic phase will allow you to accomplish your aspirations. Here are the reasons:

The 6 Benefits of Short-Term Planning

1 — YOU TAKE ACTION MORE EASIER

A period short enough to motivate you to fulfill your obligations and long enough to achieve your ambitions. Unlike long-term goals, we tend to procrastinate, postpone our work, become demotivated, or even doubt our project. Thanks to a short cycle, your potential worries disappear, because you are immersed in your steps and deadlines to respect.

2 — YOU LEARN TO SAY NO

You need to stay focused and therefore you prioritize your actions. Therefore, you will be able to stop all interruptions and concentrate on the essentials of your tasks. Thus, you capitalize on your energy, instead of scattering it unnecessarily.

3 – YOU BECOME A GREAT STRATEGIST

You become flexible and adapt easily to the unexpected. During Covid-19, many companies had to find solutions quickly to avoid going out of business. In fact, long-term projects were aborted because there was little visibility on the future. With short deadlines, you use creativity and responsiveness to problems, stay the course and see things through to the end.

4 — YOU GAIN SELF-CONFIDENCE AND DYNAMISM

The more you complete your missions, the more you advance towards your goal, which allows you to stay motivated until the end of your cycle. No more doubts, since you see concretely after each task completed and each week spent that you are progressing and that the finish line is close.

5 — YOU STRENGTHEN YOUR PERSONAL DISCIPLINE AND GAIN NEW SKILLS

When you maintain effective rigor and organization, you improve your skills. Because you will get out of your comfort zone to manage your team, develop active listening with your customers, strengthen marketing strategies, etc. You will perfect techniques essential to the evolution of your business.

6 — YOU NEVER FAIL

Either you successfully complete your 90-day goals or you learn from your mistakes. With the lessons learned, you will know which path to take to succeed. Moreover, if you find that your idea did not meet your expectations, then you will have wasted only 3 months. You will be able to start a new goal with a good foundation and in a new direction.

Simple steps to follow to complete your projects

First, you need to have a vision of the outcome you want to achieve. Otherwise, it's like setting an intention or making a resolution like many people do on New Year's Eve. You know how they end up... in regrets. Plus, our reptilian brain tends to panic or exaggerate the magnitude of the work when the idea remains unclear. Clarifying your goal will allow you to identify the resources needed to accomplish it... or not. Here are the steps to follow:

1 — BRAINSTORM ALL THE GOALS THAT ARE IMPORTANT TO YOU

During this time, avoid censoring yourself, write down everything that comes to mind, both superfluous thoughts and those that make sense. Then, sort out the most relevant ones. During this step, don't forget to determine why each goal is important to you.

2 — PRIORITIZE EACH GOAL

If you have chosen a project that requires more time than 90 days, break it into smaller pieces and into several cycles.

3 — SELECT THE TWO OR THREE MAIN OBJECTIVES

By choosing two or three goals, you can focus on your real priorities. Remember that 90-day goals are a short enough time frame to spread yourself too thin with too many goals.

4 — LIST ALL NECESSARY ACTIONS

Think about the challenges and actions you need to take to achieve your goal. Then you will integrate them into your 90 Day Journal . If you don't know what steps to follow, don't worry, you can start with one task which will lead you to another and so on.

5 — TAKE ASSESSMENT

Report on your progress once or twice a week. Reporting on your work gives you the opportunity to see right away what is working and what is not. In addition, it will also allow you to become aware of the relevance of the methods you are using and to adjust them if necessary.

6 — FIND AN ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER

You will share with him your commitments and the results obtained. Choose a person who supports you morally in your activity, this can be a friend or a member of your family or your team. As you will have to report, you will be forced to provide conclusions, which will help you to meet your obligations.

7 — CONGRATULATE YOURSELF ON EACH CHALLENGE COMPLETED

Determine how you can measure your success. At each successful milestone, congratulate yourself! This boosts your self-confidence, your determination and encourages you to go further.

As you must have understood so far, planning your goals over 90 days has an impact on both your work and your mind. Thanks to this more or less short cycle, you will remain focused and dynamic throughout your program. You will use your time productively for visible effects. To achieve a goal, the latter must respect certain criteria. We see this right away.

The SMART method for effectively defining your objectives

For an action plan to work, you need to define clear results. You may have heard of the SMART method, during your studies or when you were an employee in a company. You will find that this process, when understood and applied, brings real impacts to your business. For the realization of any project, the key is precision. The more you state your actions and deadlines to be met, the more you will obtain the expected effects.

There are five important points to consider. Your mission must be: specific, measurable, ambitious and achievable, realistic, time-defined. Don’t worry, we’ll discover this in detail:

– S as in specific

Your goal should answer the following questions: Who? What? How?

Instead of "I am learning to use an action plan", prefer “I use the SMART method to create my commercial offer”

– M as in measurable

Measuring your goal is essential to achieving it.

“I will do some prospecting to sell my services,” but rather “I will contact 5 clients every morning from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. to offer my services.”

– A as in ambitious and achievable

Your goal should challenge you without seeming unattainable, as this could discourage you. We advise you to find the right balance so that your efforts bring you mini-victories that boost your motivation.

– R as in realistic

We tend to want to perform several activities in too short a time frame. Either we underestimate the duration of the task or we overestimate our ability to produce a certain number of them. So, avoid injunctions such as: “I contact 30 clients per day and sign 5 big contracts per month.”

Take a few moments with a pen and paper or a tablet and stylus to write down your constraints: time, capacity, environment and money. This way, you will know if you have all the resources to operate or if you need to find them.

– T as in temporal

This is the most important part of the process. It’s the one that will push you to reach the finish line. Giving your idea and tasks a deadline will encourage you to stay on track, avoid procrastination, and make it easier to take action.

So, a precise and realistic objective allows you to produce appropriate actions and thus save time to meet your deadlines. We have decided to share with you a nugget to put all the chances on your side. You are about to know the influence of writing in the completion of your projects.

The Importance of Writing for Effective Results

To make your vision a reality, put it in black and white is powerful. I advise you to read the article: How to keep a journal to be more successful . It creates a significant cognitive impact. It's like making a contract with yourself. Scientific research shows that writing down your goals allows the two hemispheres of your brain to connect through the corpus callosum. Thus, an exchange of information takes place and facilitates the coordination of the operations to be carried out. Everything that is written down is registered in your unconscious and leads you towards action.

Indeed, a kinesthetic memory is triggered with the movements of the hand to hold the pencil, noting on the paper each of the letters. You can use a tablet and a stylus, this produces an identical effect, because you reproduce the same gestures, unlike the computer keyboard.

In fact, millionaire Grant Cardone, author of the bestseller " The 10X Rule ," recommends writing and reading your goals morning and evening. Through this daily routine, you anchor your goals in your brain, which will give you the relevant ideas to accelerate the realization of your programs.

Final tip for achieving your 90-day goals

You now know all the techniques to use to carry out your professional projects. Thanks to the triptych: 90-day goals + SMART method + writing , you will get significant results. Everything then becomes possible, since with the experience and successes already accomplished and accumulated, you know that you can start again. Moreover, you will be able to embark on this project that seemed so difficult to you, not so long ago.

To make it easier for you to put into practice the advice given in this article, InMotion Planner offers you the 90 Day Journal . This brings together the essential steps to establish your action plan combined with the power of digital journaling.