Whether you are a student, sole practitioner, freelancer or business owner, setting goals can be a great way to determine if your plans are going in the right direction or if the events over the last 12 months give you a good enough reason to make changes. One thing is certain: without goals, we lack focus and direction.

To accomplish our goals, we need to know how to set them and follow through. Wanting to be involved in high-end projects but working only on renovating bathrooms will do nothing in helping to achieve our goals. The goal-setting process starts by acknowledging that a lot of hard work will be required to succeed. Depending on your particular ambitions, achieving the ultimate goals you set can take a long time. This is why it is important to set both long-term and short-term goals.

Long-term goals

Deadlines for long-term goals should be set around three to five years. One way to set reasonable goals is to formulate them as your company’s mission statement: if you own a business, reflect on why you started it and where do you see it going in the next few years. The same techniques can also apply to full-time employed architects. Ask yourself: Why did I take this job? What did I hope to gain from working here? Am I where I expected to be when I first took the job? These questions can not only help you figure out how to plan your future but can also help determine any traps that you may have fallen into since the last time you thought about your goals.

Setting goals can be harder than it looks. You might not know where to begin. Why not use some proven goal-setting techniques as a road map to getting there? The SMART mnemonic is a great method for doing so:

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Attainable

R – Relevant

T – Timely

Let’s break the SMART technique down:

Set Specific Goals

Your goals must be well defined. You should be able to answer five questions: Who? Where? What? When? Why? What do you want to accomplish? Let’s say you want to increase your revenue by a certain amount over the next six months, or you want to set up another income stream. Who will carry out what task in accomplishing this? Will you target a specific location or area? What must you change in order for this goal to be met? When have you set the deadline? Why do you want to achieve this goal?

Set Measurable Goals

You have to be as precise as possible in order to track your progress. This can be done by installing precise amounts, dates and milestones into your goal. Otherwise, without a way to measure your success you won’t be able to figure out if you have actually achieved what you set out to do. To determine if your goals are measurable, ask yourself: How much do I need to make/create? How many milestones do I need to install in order to keep control of the project?

Set Attainable Goals

You have to set goals that are reasonable as well as ambitious enough to present a challenge. If you set your goals too high, you run the risk of failure and having your confidence shattered. Let’s say you have just set up your own office with a partner. If you expect to have two international branches with 100 employees in each by the end of the year, then you will likely fail and demoralize yourself in the process. Achieving your goals has to involve risk, but also has to strike a balance.

Set Relevant Goals

Each of your goals needs to be aligned with the direction in which you want to take your career and personal life. They need to contribute towards achieving overall long-term success. They shouldn’t be scattered or inconsistent. Achieving irrelevant goals might seem good at the time, but if they don’t contribute to the end goal, they are time ill spent.

Set Time-Bound Goals

Giving yourself deadlines is the best way to move toward success. Working toward a deadline creates a sense of urgency that will force you to make incremental daily efforts and better organize your time. Without implementing smaller, set milestones, it could take forever to accomplish your larger plans as they get put off in favor of minor, administrative tasks.

Action Plan

Archipreneurs can take actions to lead them in the right direction. Does learning how to operate a new software contribute to your plans? Then find a way to acquire a demo or educational version of the software, invest in a training course, or watch a video tutorial. Allocate a specific amount of time to educating yourself, and set a goal to complete an entire project using the software.

To keep on track, task management apps and online tools can help you organize your week. The app you choose will depend on the type of work you do. Trello, Evernote, Wunderlist, Strides and GoalsOnTrack are great organizational tools, as well as time trackers like Habit List, HabitBull, irunurun, which can even help you change your method of working and make you more productive.

Unforeseen Opportunities

Once you set your goals, you need to be pretty consistent in following through. However, there are times when an unforeseen opportunity that might lead you in another direction presents itself. Should you keep your eye on the goals you have already set, or should you change your plans?

This is a good time to look back and figure out why you set your goals in the first place, and see if this new direction might even contribute toward achieving them. Let’s say you decided to set up your own business as a designer. You start working toward achieving this goal, but are suddenly presented with a great job offer in the same industry. This job could delay your plans but might also provide you with the experience needed for running your own business. Will you be learning business and management skills in this new job? Will taking on this job introduce you to a useful network of contacts?

Making these types of decisions is hard, which makes it essential that you fix your long-term goals in order to understand what journey you’ll have to make to achieve them.

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There are many daily things that can distract us from achieving our goals. Facebook, emails, and binge-watching TV series can all take up too much of our time without us ever realizing it. This is why setting specific short-term goals and sticking to your action plan is essential.

Do you have an effective goal-setting technique? Write to us in the comments below.

The post SMART Goal-Setting Techniques for a Successful New Year appeared first on Archipreneur.

For example, Richard Branson keeps four types of lists: ideas, thing people say, people to call and people who influence him. Thenotebook or idea book format is flexible and can be adapted to individual habits, needs and areas of work.

According to a widely recognized study published by American researcher and psychology professor Donald W. MacKinnon, creativity comes in three different forms-artistic creativity that is intuitive and reflects the person’s inner perceptions, scientific and technological creativity, which deals with finding new solutions to practical and technical problems, and hybrid creativity, which allows the creator to ponderproblems and come up with solutions by incorporating into them their own personality. The third kind is often associated with the field of architecture and professions in which playfulness and technical precision converge.

“Anyone who aspires to lead a company must develop a habit of taking notes. I carry a notebook everywhere I go.” Richard Branson

MacKinnon’s findings also showed that creativity in general is not a talent, but a way of operating that can be applied to all types of work by learning to get into an open/creative mode of thinking, which allows you to play with problems and brainstorm, or into a closed mode, which relates to the execution of solutions.

Creativity is a crucial element in the early stages of project development. Having an idea book can be of great help at these times but, depending on the way it’s structured, it can also be used to boost productivity throughout the entire process. It can be kept as a notebook, sketchpad or a digital collection of thoughts and concepts on platforms such as Evernote, which allows one to focus, organize and be constantly inspired. Here are seven ways in which having an idea book can help your business:

#1 – Idea Vault

While some ideas are implemented throughout different phases of a project, a wealth of ideas ends up in the bin. Some of the disregarded ideas might not work when solving a specific problem, but could be extremely valuable in another situation. Instead of focusing all our attention on the project at hand, a small part of our time should be dedicated to taking note of those flashes of brilliance that would otherwise go unnoticed. Writing down scratched creative ideas with potential could create a great asset stock.

#2 – Get Things Done

Once written down or captured as a sketch, an idea becomes more crystallized in a similar way as when we tell or show it to another person. Having an outlet where one can articulate their thoughts can prove beneficial when it comes to productivity. In that sense, a book idea can be used in several ways-as a loose calendar, a journal or a work sheet where noted ideas are ticked as accomplished.

#3 – Boost Creativity

In the career of any archipreneur, there are extremely prolific days and then there are times when ideas don’t come easily. In moments when our zest and enthusiasm for work are drying up, it is important to remain motivated. Peeking into an idea book can sometimes provide specific solutions, but more often can be used to boost confidence and inspire. By going through thoughts and concepts assembled over time, one is easily be reminded of the wealth of possibilities that accompany every project. This can be conductive to creativity and cause our thinking to become more playful and branch out into new directions.

#4 – Clarify Thinking

Lack of structure in business is a guarantee for failure, but when it comes to idea books, messiness can be good. The lack of cohesiveness and organization allows one to capture loose thoughts and let their mind wonder without the fear of a bad outcome. However, having an idea book does bring another kind of structure. Although potential shortcomings and flaws are permitted when writing down ideas, by being “articulated” on paper or display, a thought pattern can emerge to reveal the way our mind works. Some have a more organized approach to taking notes by categorizing and constantly updating them. In either case, developing a habit of capturing ideas on a daily basis creates a kind of discipline that spills into other areas of our work and life.

#5 – Make Networking Efficient

As an entrepreneur, a large part of your time is dedicated to networking at business meetings, conferences and other events within your industry. Taking a snapshot of a business card or writing down impressions of people and conversations can help remember them before they become vague outlines. The number of people we meet can be overwhelming, which is why taking notes whenever you encounter someone new has significant advantages over simply taking their cards.

#6 – Process Experiences

Getting through a project from conception to completion can be a lengthy and hectic endeavor. Specific experiences and dynamics can be lost in the process of getting things to work and meeting deadlines. Using an idea book as a sort of person journal will provide a way of capturing observations on projects as they progress. This way small lessons learnt become more clear and easier to incorporate into future projects.

#7 – Keep Track of Goals

Having a great vision for a business is the first step towards success, but what separates those that make it, is the ability to follow through and execute ideas. Writing these down will help you visualize specific and long-term goals and motivate into action.

“Ideas are like slippery fish; they have a peculiar knack for getting away from us unless we gaffe them on the point of a pencil.” Earl Nightingale

Nowadays, anyone carrying a smartphone has instant access to numerous apps that allow us to take notes. Regardless of whether you use digital tools or have a more analogue approach, keeping an idea book is a must in entrepreneurship. If you’re looking for a note-taking app, you can check of Evernote, Google Notes, Uber Note, and several new ones that share a similar principle of enabling users to collect and organize different types of media. These vary by type of content and area of work-from word-based to multimedia content, depending on the industry in which you operate. Or you can simply opt for a good old Moleskine.

Let us know how you keep track of your ideas?

The post 7 Reasons Why Every Archipreneur Should Keep an Idea Book appeared first on Archipreneur.