The end of the first month of the year is a perfect time to check in on your progress toward your goals for the year.
You had enough time to put your plan into action and begin to see some results. You also still have plenty of time in the year to make up for shortcomings in the first month.
Waiting until the first half of the year or sometimes even after the first quarter might be too late. I’ve experienced that and seen that in a lot of businesses.
Track what you’ve done so far this year to make the changes necessary for your future success.
The most important areas of focus are your actions and leading indicator results. This means you might pay more attention to the activities that will cause your success than your actual early success.
Early success can be misleading. Say you’re having your best January in terms of revenue. If so, congrats! The real question, though, is how did you make those sales?
The goals we have are only achieved if we engage in the right activities consistently throughout the year. The compound effect of what we do will create our success or lack thereof.
Look back over the month and ask:
- Do I know what specific activities I planned to do to meet my goal? (If not, start with that.)
- Did I do what I planned? What % did I do the activities the way I planned?
- What were the initial results of the activity?
If you’re looking at this in the context of business goals, your activities that are responsible for your success are probably driving sales and/or finding talent. Are the results of those activities what you expected it would be?
You can do the same thing for health. Track your number of workouts and food. Was the amount of workouts and the intensity of the workout what you planned? Have you eaten the kind of diet you planned? What happened as the immediate result?
The key here is to catch problems in our activities and routines early so there’s time to fix what we do. When you calibrate now, the likelihood of you achieving your goals and your version of success increases immensely.
It’s only in our doing that we achieve success. Take advantage of the opportunity to examine what you’ve done, haven’t done and the initial results to make sure that your future is what you want it to be. Focus on what you do and success follows.