Had trouble balancing your priorities last year?

Happy New Year! 

If you’ve made New Years resolutions in the past, you know how hard it can be to stick to them. 

The biggest problem is often figuring out how to balance your priorities. If you have had trouble balancing work, family, spirituality, health, wealth, then you know what it feels like when you put more than you can handle on your plate. 

Because of that, I’ve always been an avid fan of setting goals regularly and recalibrating them throughout the year. 
Over the past 3 months, I started using a whiteboard to tackle goal setting for my 5 top Priorities. 

Using something I call 'The Backtracker Exercise’, it helps me take a quick birds eye view of the foreseeable future, along with what’s important today. 

The Backtracker Exercise 

Step 1. 

Imagine it's January 1st, 2015, exactly one year from today. In the far right-hand column, write down the top 5 outcomes you'd like to have happen within the next 12 months. This can come from any of the 6 areas of your life in the GW wheel. Next to each outcome, write the expected date that you'll have it done by. MAKE THESE GOALS BIG! 

---

Step 2. 

The middle column is your 1-month time frame. Between now and January 31st, 2014, what are the 5 things you want to do or figure out? Write them down, then compare them to your year-end goals. Do they match up? If so, great. If not, that's okay too, because for instance, if you take a financial goal like "Save $1,200 this year" and have it automatically transferred into your savings account every month, there's no need for you to put it into the middle column. The reason for this being that you've already taken the necessary action to make that outcome happen. 

---

Step 3.

When I wake up at 5:00am, part of my routine now also includes writing out my biggest priorities for the day. 

It feels so good at the end of the day to just CROSS THEM ALL OFF (Or not, on the days I slack off).

---