6 Steps to Help Prioritize Your Activities, Set Some Goals and Increase Your Overall Happiness  

Keeping oneself accountable in today’s world is no easy feat. We are bombarded constantly with distractions. From the moment we wake up, we have email and texts on our phones, laptops with website alerts, updates from social-media websites, and advertising on the radio in our cars. Keeping focused can seem impossible, and it can leave a person feeling unsatisfied.

Do you ever feel like you are struggling to get the things done you want to accomplish in your life, that there aren’t enough hours in the day, and that you are frustrated with how to get it all done?  Well, you certainly are not alone!  The source of this frustration stems back to accountability. It is a crucial component that many times is simply overlooked.  Many of us find that we simply aren’t making the most of our time, or we are taking on too many things, whether at work or socially, which overloads our days and leaves us feeling frustrated. If you truly want to spend more time with family, let’s say, and less time at work, then you need to create a plan in order to accomplish that.

Start by taking a step back, figuring out what you want to accomplish, and executing a plan and better habits in order to get there. If you are not sure where to start, try the below steps.

• Make a list. First make a list of what is important to you.  For example, one person might list family, career, and health while another could list career, friends, health, and travel; no answer is “right” or “wrong.”  Make that list, and then think back to the previous three months. Put a percentage next to each item indicating how much time you spent on each one. You may find that other items wind up on your list, or you will be surprised in realizing how much time you spend on one particular item.

• Prioritize the list. Now rewrite that list of important items and put the percentage next to each of how much time you want to spend on them.  You have just taken control over how you want to spend your time.

• Make a long-term plan. Now comes the tougher part: How do you begin to make the changes necessary to spend your time as you see fit?  Here comes that whole accountability piece! What do you want to accomplish in the long-run? What is your ultimate goal? Once you know that, you can start to breakdown your list of activities to build a long-term plan to accomplish your goal.

• Take each item step by step. First look at your current situation (the percentages from the past three months) and figure out how to make those changes first. Remove any obligations that do not fit your goals and begin to plan where you want your time to be spent. Chart out the next three to six months in regards to bigger events, such as creating more family time and travel, for instance. Putting plans together ahead of time gives you control on the front end.

• Deep dive into trouble areas. Next map out your weeks. If you constantly feel behind at work, then you need to break down your hours there and discover a new way to execute what you are doing. Figure out how you are spending your time and how you can improve that by rewriting where you are putting your energy.

• Set some short-term goals. Goal setting allows you to create accountability for yourself in all aspects of your life. You will be better prepared, more organized, and more fulfilled because you are taking strides toward creating the life that you want.

Now this plan only works if you stick to it, of course. If you realize that you have to stay on task at work and get certain items completed before noon, that means you must stick to that and avoid distractions, such as mid-morning coffee breaks, chatting with coworkers, or even constantly showing up right on time with no plan and losing the first hour of the workday.

Taking control and being accountable with your time will change your life. It will allow you to see more clearly how you want to spend your time and put you in the right direction.

In What They Don’t Teach You in the Harvard Business School, Mark McCormack offered an insight when he explained why three percent of Harvard MBAs make tens times as much as the other 97% combined. The answer was a simple question. “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” In 1979, interviewers asked new graduates from the Harvard’s MBA Program and found that 84% had no specific goals at all, 13% had goals that were not committed to paper, and 3% had clear, written goals and plans to accomplish them. We cannot hope to accomplish much without goals. Without those goals, we are not keeping ourselves accountable.