Investing in yourself is important.  Because you are ultimately the one you will have to spend the rest of your life with. Part of investing in yourself, is learning to set, and achieve, short term goals. Short term goals are often looked down upon because people may think you aren’t striving for the real thing or your ultimate success. But this isn’t true, short term goals are actually a crucial part to achieving success.

How Long Should Short Term Goals Be?

When considering setting short term goals for yourself, it’s imperative to consider the length of your goals. And there is no right answer to this question, rather the length of time depends on how you know yourself to perform best. Some people who have short attention spans do better with daily, or even weekly goals.

If you don’t have a hard time staying on the path to success, you might want to aim for a few monthly goals, with some which extend a bit longer. As a rule, any goal with a completion time of over one year is generally considered a long-term goal.

Make Them Specific

Just because a goal is short term does not mean you can be less specific than you are with your long-term goals. You should lay out your short-term goals in the same way you lay out your long-term ones, with details, plans for when things go wrong, and milestones along the way.

Chances are you won’t need milestones for a daily goal, but they still can be implied if needed. For example, if your goal is to walk 10,000 steps per day, you could have a milestone of hitting 5,000 steps before lunch. No matter what your short-term goals may be, make sure you write them down in specifics, and track your progress in them as you go.

Why Short-Term Goals?

People often tend to spend most of their time focusing on the long-term goals. Which is fine, except when something goes wrong with these long-term goals, they are easily dissuaded and may even let the goal go at the slightest bump in the road.

This is because short term goals, especially those which lead to your long-term goals, help keep you motivated and serve as markers on the path to your dreams. That way when difficulties arrive, you don’t feel as a set back because you can see exactly how far you have come.

The easiest way to set short term goals is by breaking down one of your long-term goals. For instance, if you want to become a professional musician, short term milestones could be writing your own songs, recording an album, playing a show, opening a show for a bigger name band, until you finally reach your ultimate goal of being a headliner for a show. Just breaking this goal down made it more attainable, because you are certainly able to write your own songs without anyone else’s input, and you can start that right now.

Although later steps do take others to see your same vision, it is something you can be actively working towards instead of just sitting around and hoping you are one day discovered as an amazing singer.

Some people might try to tell you that short term goals are pointless, when, in fact, the complete opposite is true. A crucial part of investing in yourself as a person comes when you set short term goals. This is because if you set these goals properly, and make them specific, they will eventually lead you towards achieving your ultimate goal in life, no matter what that goal may be.