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The Power of Urgency

We often set ambitious goals. We start out with great vigor and then after a couple of months, life catches up.

 

When this happens, there is often that nagging feeling that we are missing out on things that we promised ourselves to do. We feel that we are failing in achieving our goal and that dwindles our motivation. This, in turn, makes working on that goal again very difficult and seem like an insurmountable challenge.

 

Why does this happen? Many times this is due to the reason that we do not have a sense of urgency about our goals. We set a goal but do not set a time frame to achieve that goal. Even if we set a time frame, we tend to allow a generous amount of catch up time built in. This gives us a false sense of security about our goals. We think, we still have time to catch up on the goal and relax. Ultimately, we forget about, other things take priority and suddenly we realize that we are not in position to attain that goal anymore.

 

Has it happened with you? It sure does happen to me lot. How do I plan to fight it and actually improve my rate of completing my goals?

 

My solution is to infuse a sense of urgency in my goals. I want to cut the slack time inbuilt in my goal achievement time frame. Basically, divide my goals in smaller sub goals and put a tight deadline around those goals. Let me elaborate with an example – I have this website up for almost a year now. However, I have only written a handful of articles in this time period. I have only recently started publishing one post every Monday and Thursday (around 3 –  4 weeks).

 

Here’s my plan to infuse some urgency in this blog. I will write 30 articles in the next 30 days. Let us try and understand what this means and what sort of commitment is required. I will write 30 blog posts on topics related to productivity and personal finance in 30 days and publish them on Char Paisa. This does not mean that there will be one article per day. There can be several articles per day and none on some days. My end goal is to publish 30 articles within 30 days, i.e., by 9th July, 2016. This includes 21 weekdays and 9 weekend days.And just to clarify things, yes, I will count this post as the first of them. Yes, I will count the regular posts on Mondays and Thursdays for this assignment.

 

Now this is a significant challenge for me. Remember, I published 11 posts in 11 months of running this website and this requires a serious step up in efforts from my side. The urgency in this plan will be daunting. However, let us take a moment to reflect upon the outcome and its effect  This blog would have added 30 brand new articles. This would translate into a value of approximately Rs. 18,000 (according to freelancer) or US $ 300. Better than spending all the money, I guess. Also, it would help generate more traffic for this blog and would help the ultimate goal of generating some revenue based on the value that I provide from my articles.

 

I will review this on 10th of July and give you a report on if and how this sense of urgency helped me and this blog in any way. Looking forward to this challenge.

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