4 Ways To Stay Focused After Smashing Your Goals

Almost everyone starts the new year off by setting goals, whether those be personal, business or hobbiest goals, and it's at around the half point in the year when you find you're either doing pretty darn well, or not so well. Staying focused on your goals can be a headache, and boy do I know it, but knowing how to stay focused is the only way you're going to achieve them and feel great afterwards. Sharing your building steps, pushing yourself with smaller, more tangible goals - it's all about getting to your goals and feeling absolutely awesome afterwards.

But what happens when you've smashed your goals, what comes next?

People who've reached their goals tend to fall into a sort of void. They've been working at something for weeks, months, possibly years, and when it all comes to a head, they've got nothing left to motivate them. There's nothing to work hard at, there's no reward at the end of the road, just a path that leads to somewhere and nowhere. It's important to remember that reaching and achieving your goals is not the end result, and as with most things, there's always another adventure or exciting journey to be had right around the corner.

Some don't want another all absorbing goal on their plate just yet, and quite understandably so too, and for those people, there's a few things you can be doing after your achieving your goals to keep you going strong until the year ends, rather than resting on your laurels and feeling lost.

Analyze How You Achieved Your Goals

If you've achieved your goals much sooner than you thought you would, then first things first, give yourself a round of applause and get yourself some sort of reward because wow, do you deserve it, but remember to come back and get started on looking at how and why you managed to achieve those goals in record time. While you might have just struck it lucky, one of the reasons people achieve their goals sooner than expected is because they underestimate their worth, and what they can achieve when they put their mind to it, and so they achieve them sooner than they expected to.

4 Ways To Stay On Top Of and Focused on Your Blog Goals

Late last year, I talked about setting blog goals, why it's an important thing to do, the type of goals they needed to be, and even shared with you a free goal planner to help you set those goals. Turns out, a lot of us need a shove in the right direction when it comes to aiming for something and working hard at it. I tend to find that setting the goals is easy enough, but when to comes down to the nitty gritty of actually keeping up with them, hitting them, and smashing them to pieces, I need a good ol' poke with my motivation stick.

At this point in the year, it's not uncommon to find yourself looking at two different types of people. The first type are the ones who have every day of their entire year planned, with tricks on how to advance their goals, hit them, and pretty them up with unicorn piss and rainbows made of skittles. They're usually just that tiny bit too competitive and just have to tell how well they're doing, all the tine.

The second type are a little, less motivated. They're behind. They're struggling. They ditched some of their goals because, although they knew deep down they weren't achievable, they stressed themselves out over it anyway. They think about giving up, joining a nunnery and befriended god in order to somehow achieve a level of happiness that their forgotten goals never could.

Neither one of these types of people is bad, and neither is what they're doing, there are just healthy ways to go about your goals, ways that don't involve putting them on a bonfire to crackle away into nothing. It's important to remember there's a reason you made those goals, and wanted to achieve those things, and in order to stay on top of them, you've got to have a least half a plan to start with.

So, how do you stick with and stay on top of your goals?

1. Cut them down into smaller, more achievable goals

One of my blog goals for the year is the reach a minimum of 5,000 pageviews a month by the end of the year. That's quite a big aim for someone who was reaching just around half that when she set it, but to make it look less scary, I've cut that goal down into smaller, more manageable, more achievable quarterly goals. Rather than aim for 5,000 straight away, I've aimed for a minimum of 3,000 between January and March, nowhere near as scary, but more likely to happen.

My Books, Blogging and Life Goals for 2016

Boom, and we're back on board the blogging train! How were your Christmas and Holiday celebrations? Did you bring the New Year in with a bang? The last few weeks of December were pretty awesome and stressful and lovely all at once, especially when you consider I worked both Boxing Day, the following Sunday and New Years, and the joy of retail means that Christmas and New Year have been, well, let's just say no blogging occurs at the end of those work days, which pretty much explains why I took my break for as long as I did, but I'm back, and that's what matters.

Christmas this year was a smaller, low key affair than it was last year. Last year involved three families around one table and me in the kitchen all evening, but 2015's Christmas was much calmer. We had one dinner at the Grandmother-In-Law's Christmas Day, and another on the 28th with my Nanna due to work commitments - much less stressful. Also, it was our first Christmas with Simba, and sure, watching him play with and try to eat the wrapping paper was a lot more fun than picking it up, but he was happy.

So far, my 2016 has been rather chill, but I want to know how your 2016 is so far. Is the diet still on, or did you work your way through some Christmas sweeties and vow to start again next month? Dear friend, you've got to stop setting goals you just aren't going to follow through with, it's not only pointless, but it's counter-productive too, and the only person you're disappointing is yourself.

Me, I'm all for making goals this year. Last year, I didn't make any goals, and I really regret it. I know I learnt a lot, and achieved a lot, but I'm just not as proud of those achievements as I should be, or want to be, and that sucks. This year, I want to reach the end and think 'damn right, look at everything you achieved, and hey, this year wasn't the year for this or that, but maybe next year!' I talked about everything I achieved and some of last year's favourite things a few weeks ago, but let's check out this years goals instead.

Setting Blog Goals and Why They're Important (+ Free Goal Planner!)

For most people, making news years resolutions consist of eating less bad food, (when you have all that Christmas chocolate in the house, puh-lease!) doing more exercise (running for the bus counts, right?) and spending less time on social media (I'm sorry, what?) but for bloggers, there's a little more involved. New Year is the time for sitting down and making some plans, or if you're the type of blogger I used to be, forgetting about plans, winging it for most of year and finding yourself in the same place year on year.

If you want to see any change in your blog, it's a good idea to change how you blog.

Changing how you blog is really rather subjective, but to see any real differences, you've got to at least sit down and take a look at what you're currently doing, work out what's working, and what's, well, not.

Let's look at an example.