Quarterly Goals: How to Schedule Your Work so it Gets Done

Stop spinning your wheels and finally make progress! I’m going to walk you through how to do this right now.

Today we’re talking about the 90-day goal strategy I use to grow my business and serve my clients with excellence. Used properly this technique will help you get more done at work and/or finally get some traction in the business you run. 

I recommend using the quarters of the year when creating your 90-day goals (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sept, Oct-Dec) this will help with keeping things simple and consistent. If you are in the middle of a quarter right now that’s fine, just set a goal up until the beginning of the next quarter and make a new 90-day goal then.

With that in mind, there are 3 steps to a creating an effective 90-day goal.

1- Define your long-term aim

Before you set your outcomes in the short term, you must have a vision for what you want your next 3-10 years to look like. Connecting your quarterly goals to this long-term perspective will help give you motivation when the goal isn’t happening fast enough and you want to give up. Take a moment to define what your specific aim for yourself or your business is three years from now.

A good 3-year aim is something that will require a stretch to complete. It’s beyond your current capabilities and will require personal growth to achieve. Additionally, it’s important that your long-term aim inspires you at an emotional level. This step is not just an intellectual exercise. It’s more about engaging your inner child-like wonder, dreaming again, and tapping into what is genuinely, intrinsically motivating to you. 

2- Break it down into milestones

Next step is to map out what the major steppingstones are on the way to your long-term aim. This brainstorming process should take at least 30 minutes, any shorter and you might be rushing it and forget something. Feel free to take your time with this, nothing wrong with researching and reflecting for a week to fully lay out the roadmap of achieving your aim. 

By the end you should have each major milestone written down and an idea of what order to attack each one. There are two types of milestones: Skills and Actions Steps. Skill milestones are ones that require to you learn or become something new. For example, if your aim is to become a VP at your company, a Skill milestone could be to read 5 books on climbing the corporate ladder to learn how to do that. 

An Action Step milestone is something you need to do to get to your aim. Get a meeting with somebody, hit a KPI, create a business plan, join a networking group, etc. These action steps might require smaller action steps to complete, that’s fine. The idea here is not to catalogue every minute detail of achieving your aim. It’s to know the major milestones on the way.

3- Use project hours to set your 90-day goal

We all have many responsibilities and obligations in life: Family, friends, work, clubs/organizations, etc. This means we need to be strategic with our time to make sure we’re giving our best to each of these areas. That’s why it’s important to define how many project hours you have. Project hours are what I call blocks of time you have to specifically put towards your 90-day goal.

For example, if your 90-day goal was to get 3 clients, project hours would look like sales calls and activates related to onboarding clients. Project hours for that goal would not include any other aspect of your job or business. It’s important to separate project hours from any other activity that takes time so you have a true understanding of realistically how much time you have to put towards your goal.

Once you have an understanding of how many project hours you have available to you per week, you can set your 90-day goal. Ideally your 90-day goal is one of your Skill or Action Step milestones. If you don’t have enough time to complete at least one of your milestones in the next 90 days that’s fine, just make sure you’re being realistic with what you can achieve based off your available project hours.

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-Joey