Focus on Today, Not Just the Future
Of the many, many articles I’ve read and wrote about goal setting over the past few years, the only thing that got me stuck and worked in my own life is focusing on the little things you can do today.
You should definitely set long-term goals and plans for yourself, but in order to be successful in achieving them, you need to do it step by step.
In a sense, this is the opposite of “don’t miss the forest for the trees.” You don’t want to get too carried away with meaningless details that keep you unable to finish anything. But focusing on what you can actually do in any given day, you reduce the stress of thinking about all the things you need to do, and just, well, in general, perform them .
This is especially true of financial goals, which almost always seem overwhelming and actually change our lives for the better every day. Right now, for example, I am working to increase my emergency fund. If I think about the total that I want to achieve – $ 20,000 – it’s overwhelming and can even become a deterrent. But by breaking it down into daily or weekly activities, I was able to make some progress. Not much, mind you, but not much. And this is very good.
Now consider something like retirement. If you’ve read an article that says you must have $ 1 million to comfortably retire, you might not want to put it all together. It seems such a huge, unattainable figure that it is even a little difficult to fully understand. But if you can put it off for a moment and think about a small, concrete step you can take today – say, open a Roth IRA and put in $ 100 to get started – you are closer to achieving that goal than you were.
It means forgiving yourself when and if you make a mistake, or if it takes you longer than you would like to start making progress towards your goal. So maybe you don’t have enough savings or investments – who cares? If you focus on what you can do today to achieve what you want and keep doing it day in and day out, you will achieve what you aspired to. If one day you get it wrong, well, it’s not the end of the world. You can take it back tomorrow.
Today my focus is on getting the job done, tidying up the apartment, and laying the groundwork for a more structured budget. By the end of the day, there will be no $ 20,000 in my savings account, but that’s okay for now.
Focus on today. Then, when tomorrow comes, focus on tomorrow. You can only take this one day at a time.