THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

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The 60 Day Sprint

There are exactly 67 days left in the year.

Crazy, right? Like every year you’re probably thinking, I can’t believe it went so fast.

Hopefully you’re also saying to yourself, “it’s been an awesome year”. If you’re not that’s ok too - just like we can’t always have great days, we can’t always have great years.

Regardless of how the year has gone for us - an important question to reflect and work on, is:

“have I accomplished what I want this year?”

Or more clearly, “have I met my goals this year?”

If you didn’t do detailed goal setting this year, then you likely won’t really have an answer to that question - which is also ok. I’m a fan of laying out specific plans and goals that are measured against over time, but they’re not required to live a great life.

Making progress towards broader objectives, however, is required to live a great life. And that’s where the 60 day sprint comes in.

60 Days to change everything

Most of us already know how the last 60 days of the year are heading. Going into the holiday season we know we’re going to relax our standards on most aspects for life - if we have specific business objectives that have to be done by year end they’ll get focused on, but otherwise we’re resigned to sliding into the end of year with our standards relaxed in most areas of life.

We have New Year’s coming up right? That’s when we reset and refocus for the next year - righten the ship and charge forward.

The problem with that plan is, it doesn’t work all that well. Most new year’s resolutions fail - 80% fail by February, and only 8% of resolutions are completed.

We also know the science of habit forming tells us that incremental improvements over time lead to better results than big lofty goals.

We know objectively that letting things slide for the rest of the year means we’ll have a bigger mountain to climb than if we start today - making our odds of success much lower.

So my question to you is - why can’t you achieve that goal this year?

What would happen if you focused all your efforts on one priority over the next 60 days?

This is where the 60 day sprint comes in

60 days is a perfect amount of time to work hard on one priority. It’s not so long you’ll get distracted by other goals, and is also long enough to make serious progress towards anything.

Focusing on one priority, as opposed to multiple priorities, gives us a better chance of success.

Most of us have too many priorities (myself included), which means we don’t really have any priorities at all. Narrowing down to one priority over a short-but-significant window is a great way to actually accomplish it.

How to make it work

Here’s how it works. What’s one priority you’d really love to complete by the end of the year?

Lose bodyfat, get stronger, complete a sales goal, repair a relationship, launch a business, do a house project, Go on a trip, tighten up your financial plan, start writing a book.

Any priority I can think of is fair game.

Pick that one thing you want to make progress on, something that’s been on your mind all year and is important to you.

Then commit to focusing on it every day for the rest of the year.

That’s it - that’s the sprint.

Details to make it better

1. Tighten up the goal - make it SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely). My example - Add 2 new clients by end of year

   Note - My overall goal is to get to 20 active clients, but that’s longer term than a few months so my goal is a milestone of a larger goal.

2. Identify what daily activities need to be completed to accomplish the goal. My example - Make 3 sales calls per day

   Note - There are multiple other key activities that must occur on a daily and weekly basis to accomplish this goal, but I know this is the main thing to move the needle for me, and the one thing I’ll let slide if it’s not prioritized.

3. Measure progress - track progress daily towards your goal.

4. Create accountability - share with your spouse, a friend, partner, or employee

5. Keep it simple - this is a short exercise to come up with your one priority, and also a short exercise to measure it daily. Don’t overcomplicate it

6. Execute

Accomplishing your big awesome goals doesn’t have to wait for the new year. Especially if we find meaningful things to accomplish and break them down into manageable chunks.

Good luck.

Thanks for reading The Lifestyle Entrepreneur

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• Vision - getting teams 100% on the same page with where the company is going and how to get there

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