Three Steps to Achieve Your Dreams — in 2024

By Sarah Lake

Another year has come and gone in seemingly the blink of an eye, and it's a perfect moment to assess whether this past year brought you closer to your life goals, or if they're just as distant as this time last year. If we view our year through the clarifying lens of hindsight, it's far easier to see how staying busy with long to-do lists everyday doesn't necessarily translate to truly meaningful growth and productivity.

As sobering as this view can be, it's important to take a deep breath and gently reroute rather than being needlessly tough on yourself. The goal is never to burn yourself out by pushing harder, working more, and sacrificing more. This outdated message is a sure way to get even further away from the life you want.

Instead, what we need is some clarity on what really matters to us, and one simple life changing productivity technique to help us focus our energy on those things.

Step 1: Get Clear on Your Goals

Every so often it's important to zoom-out and take a big picture look at your life and where you're heading. Are you happy with your work, health, relationships, and lifestyle? Is there anything you've desperately wanted for yourself, but haven't figured out a plan for how to achieve it yet?

Those scary unanswered questions are the areas to lean into. You have to know what you want before you can even begin to pursue it. The more clarity you have around this, the easier it will be to differentiate important tasks from busywork that keeps your wheels spinning with no movement forward.

Sometimes it requires space, time alone, and some self-reflection to find the answers to these questions. Journaling, meditation, prayer, or even conversations with trusted loved ones can all be helpful tools to help you reconnect with your deeper goals and purpose.

Step 2: Translate Big Picture Goals into Daily Actions

Once you have a destination, you'll need a map to get you there. Breaking down long term goals into manageable pieces is the secret to success. For example, if you want to write a book, you're never going to accomplish this in one sitting. Instead, you'll need to develop a habit of writing consistently so bit by bit your daily effort can accumulate into a work of art.

All long-term goals are the same in this way. You have to think backwards from the end result to lay out the steps that'll get you there. Break these steps down into small daily or weekly tasks so you can keep your momentum going and form a habit of pursuing them.

Step 3: The Only Productivity Hack You'll Ever Need to Follow Through

The final step is the hardest, and it's where most people fail. The last step is following through on the tasks necessary to reach your goals. We can all relate to having lofty goals, but not having a solid enough plan to make them happen. To illustrate this point, a whopping 90% of people who sign up for a gym membership quit within 3 months. It's clear we need a strategy to avoid this fate, and that strategy is called: “Eat The Frog.”

“Eat The Frog” is a productivity method that proposes we should begin our day with the task we have the most resistance to doing. The "frog" so to speak.

This could mean it's something that intimidates you, something that bores you, or perhaps something you just keep putting off. Whatever your most difficult task of the day is, put that first on your to-do list and the rest of your day will be easy in comparison.

The genius of this strategy is in its simplicity. By making it a habit to conquer the truly important tasks first, you'll naturally reduce the amount of anxiety they induce and the overall amount of mental energy you spend on them.

If you do nothing else this year other than develop the habit of "eating the frog" first thing in your day, you'll be far ahead of where you are today. This little secret could be a game changer if you learn to apply it to the right tasks, and perhaps eventually, you'll even be able to tolerate a few frogs per day.

Don't underestimate the power of this simple tool and don't underestimate what you can accomplish this year.