Previous Motivation Factors:
MOTIVATION FACTOR #1: Buy A Notebook, Not A Planner.
MOTIVATION FACTOR #2: Set Yearly SMART Goals
MOTIVATION FACTOR #3: Divide Your Major Goals Into Mini-Goals
MOTIVATION FACTOR #4: Create a Master List
In the previous factors, we’ve covered two of the five elements of the “Base 5 System”. As a reminder, the first element was setting ten goals for the year and then setting mini-goals for the first goal you were going to work on. The second element was the master list. This is where you write down every single item to work on including your mini-goals. Now that you’ve got that done, it’s time to use both of them to assess your monthly goals.
Your monthly goals or monthly list works a little different than the yearly goals you set. (I may be using monthly goals and monthly list interchangeably here, so feel free to call it whatever works best for you.) If you’re using a college-ruled notebook (which I’ve recommended), I usually keep my monthly list to always 30 items. So as you look over your previous two subjects in the notebook, you want to list the 30 most important things you’ve got to do for the next 30 days (or 31 or 28…depending on what month you’re in obviously). You don’t have to list them in any certain order right now, you’re just making a list of those 30 items you want to work on through the month.
Finished? Ok, now that you’ve got that list down, next to those 30 items, draw a vertical line down the page. Next to those 30 items, put a date down when you’d like to complete them. You don’t have to have a date for every item. For example, if an item carries over to another month or it’s not high on the priority list, you may not want to set a date yet and that’s ok. But if there’s something that must be completed by a certain deadline, by all means, put that date down. I usually have dates with about half of the items on the list.
Got that done? Great…draw another vertical line next to that. Now comes the prioritization part. Decide what your top 6 items on the list are and mark them with the letter “A”. Once you’re done with that, take the next six items, and mark them with a “B”. Keep doing that until you have A through E marked six times each. Now that you’ve finished that, go back to your “A” items and number those in order of importance with a “1”, “2”, etc. Then, do the same with the other lettered items. So you should now have a list that ranges from “A-1” to “E-6”. Your month has now begun.
I will come back in a few blogs to this list, but for next time, I will go over the Weekly List.
If you do use this system and would like to leave a comment on how it goes for you, please feel free. Thank you for reading another “Motivation Factor”.
