Key Take-Aways
The micro-decisions you make each day may be blocking you from achieving your dreams.
Establish easy-to-follow routines and utilize tools like time blocking to make positive choices effortlessly.
Track, reflect, and celebrate your progress regularly to stay motivated and ensure continual improvement in achieving your business goals.
Are you tired of making goals and not reaching them?
Believe it or not, there are hundreds of choices you are making in a day that may be preventing you from achieving your dreams.
Consider how you spend your time each day. Each time you pick up your phone, respond to a notification, open a bag of chips, or turn on the TV. Each of these is a decision, and when you decide to do those things, you are deciding NOT to do something else.
Decide contains the root word “-cide, “ the Latin word for kill. Therefore, you are killing something each time you make a decision, big or small.
We often think very carefully about our long-term decisions and weigh all the pros and cons. Maybe you even make a spreadsheet to analyze the options, but when it comes to those decisions that we make every day, we don’t treat them the same way.
Whether or not we check social media or answer that email, whether or not we’re working out, these are micro-decisions that we make every day that impact our ability to achieve our goals. By choosing to doom scroll over building our web page, we are killing the chance to get that business started. It is the small, daily decisions we make that will make the largest impact on whether or not we reach our goals, but don’t lose hope, because once you recognize this tendency, you can help yourself make the micro-decisions that will lead to the results you want.
What can you do to make the right micro-decisions to reach your business goals?
Start by getting clear on your goals.
Take some time to visualize the future you want for yourself. Then consider a person who has achieved those goals. What does their typical day look like? What do they do consistently? Then develop a list of habits and routines you want to build into your daily or weekly schedule that reflect the person who has achieved that goal.
Make it easy to make the right decision.
Make routines. We are naturally lazy and want to do what is easiest, so build routines that make you do the things you want without thinking. For example, I want to develop a reflective and mindful practice, so I have developed the routine of grabbing my coffee and sitting with my journal and meditation app first thing.
Time blocking. Fill in your daily schedule so you are intentional about how you spend your time and don’t have to think about what to do or just find a way to pass the time. At the beginning of each workday, I fill in all the blank spaces in my calendar so as I go through the day I don’t have to think about what I should be doing and get tempted by scrolling social. In fact, I know I need to spend some time on social and email, so I schedule them for limited times.
Reward or punish yourself. You can decide on a treat after you complete the behavior or decide on something to deny yourself or even punish yourself. For example, I used to allow myself to eat chocolate only on days I had gone running.
Track it. In business, you have most likely heard the expression, “What gets tracked gets done”, and that is true for personal habits as well. There are tons of habit trackers that allow you to simply name the habit you want to do and check it off every day, or just put a mark on your calendar. I find that when I want to eat better, just writing down what I eat helps me to make better choices. I also track how I spend my time and money because those are my most valuable assets.
Reflect. We can improve only when we reflect on what we are doing and adjust. Simply taking time each day or week to see what is working allows you to make adjustments to ensure success. To get really clear on how well you use your time, try a time audit where you track your time for 2 weeks. It is especially important to track and celebrate our wins along the way. That helps motivate us to make more positive decisions in the future.
To read about more ideas to make sure you make the right micro-decisions each day, I highly recommend James Clear’s Atomic Habits (this affiliate link will give me a small portion of your purchase).
If you are a woman wanting to start or grow your business, schedule a free call to see how I can help you put these practices into place and reach your goals!
Remember, you can choose to make the decisions each day to reach your goals. Decide to start today!