Hello, everyone, and welcome to Episode 36. So over the last few weeks, we have been talking about the thing that everybody talks about this from a year which is goals. Just to be clear, how love goals. I make goals for the year, I break them into quarters and months, I make them on a spreadsheet. It's really pretty. I make goals each morning for the way I want my day to go. I track my progress every single day. I know how close I am to my goals by looking at my goal tracker. I love big crazy goals that push me so far out of my comfort zone. But what happens when everything revolves around one or two goals? What if everything in your life comes back to your revenue goal or to make six figures? Let's say my guess is you're a cranky, overworked person who doesn't see their kids and has an unhappy spouse. Probably unhealthy, your pants are probably too tight. And you probably haven't seen your friends in a while. Sound familiar? Most of us got into our businesses because we wanted to get away from living like that. Right from working all the time and never seeing our families and corporate having some crappy commute. I had a four hour commute into the city. Four hours, I mean, 345 if everything was on time, but it was never on time. I was cranky, and I hated it. And how many of us said, "as soon as I don't have to commute to this job anymore." I will exercise more volunteer play with my kids, etc. And how many of you have done it? How many of you have done all of it? I'm guessing not a ton of you are raising your hands right now. I sure didn't, at least in the beginning. That's because we create these goals in a vacuum. We pick a random revenue goal. And then we just need to hustle harder to make it. And then all the other things fall by the wayside and our lives fall apart. You know, though the whole idea about workaholics and everything your kids all of that divorces for crazy workaholic people. And we left corporate to get away from all that.

This was supposed to be the business we made into whatever we wanted. And slowly we creep creep, creep creep creep to the point where we start working like that again. So when your life is falling apart, and you're doing none of the things that you said you were gonna do volunteer, exercise, whatever. This is the part where you're gonna say, I don't have the time for blank, you have the same time as everyone else. What if we didn't drive ourselves into the ground until everyone around us hated us? So what I'm proposing is, along with those revenue goals that we're so keen to make every year, why can't we also have goals around the other parts of our lives? And then take the time to make them happen. You have time you have the exact same amount of time as everyone on the earth, make the time. And you do that by putting important things on your calendar first, blocking that space out before anyone else comes in and gobbles it up. If you have an open schedule, and people come and make meetings, well, yeah, there's open space there, they're going to come to make meetings. But if you have time blocked out for exercising, playing with your kids, I don't know date night when we can leave this house again during the apocalypse. Putting all of that kind of stuff on there.

First, instead of trying to squeeze it in later. We all know that most people make meetings for no reason. There are lots of good meetings we have. And I have mentioned here before how much I hate meetings that have no purpose. Those are the things that are taking up your time right now instead of playing with your kids instead of going on vacation. Instead of just sitting down with a glass of wine, the great sunshine of a spring afternoon. Those are the choices we're making by letting everyone else take over our lives. So instead, I'm proposing you put these important things on your calendar first, you lay out your schedule that says Monday morning. I'm sorry, I can't have a meeting on Monday morning because I'm doing whatever. I've been taking Monday mornings lately, hanging out and sleeping in a little bit. And then planning out my week. I don't take any of my meetings on Mondays. So here are some of the things I think that we should be making goals around as well.

Beyond just revenue in our businesses, for our life, because the whole reason we got is this damn business thing was to make our lives better. And then we didn't. So one is our health. It's so damn important. I mean, it's, we don't have our health. We don't have anything. It's not the classic saying, and I think I got that right. Oh, my goodness. What do you need to stay healthy? Is it more exercise? Is it eating better? is it changing scenery? So you're not just stuck at your desk for six hours? is it taking a walk? breathing some fresh air? Just calming down? That means blocking out your calendar, non-negotiable time for exercise? Is it a meal delivery service? Because you end up calling for takeout? Because it's 630. And you don't know what the hell you're gonna eat or feed your family. So you end up calling for takeout? What if you had those really healthy, delicious things that were just delivered? Why not? It might be just as cheap or cheaper than takeout. That's crappy. Simple things, just making a little bit of time ahead of everyone else gobbling up your time. Okay, next family? Do you want to spend more time with your spouse or with your kids or your partner, whatever that is, whatever that family looks like for you? Maybe it's just your dogs. Maybe you just want to walk your dogs more often. Does that mean making a habit of having weekly activities like game night, or going for walks in the park. I mean, right now I'm kind of melding these two with walks in the park, my son and I, I wasn't seeing him as much as I could, because I slowly sink back into working too much. And he's home from school, he's still homeschooling. And I was like, You know what, My pants are too tight. We need to do some walking and do some exercise. So we've decided that we're just going to keep walking, and I'll be like, hey, this afternoon you want to go, we did like an hour hike through a gorgeous Park that's down the street from our house. I'm tying my family time and seeing my son more often with this goal of getting in better shape, putting those together and going for a wonderful walk. And you know what, I came home and I was just, it was a gorgeous sunny day, it was freezing. But it was so beautiful out and I mental health wise, just great. I came home with the best mood and I hadn't started in the best. making time for that. Putting those on my calendar, you can check the weather, you can know a couple days in advance and be like, okay, so Tuesday, it looks like it's gonna be really sunny, three o'clock in the afternoon. Let's go put it on your calendar. So no one can book anything. You don't have to put description so everyone knows, you could just put busy or you can put things like that. So people can know that you are making priorities and families, one of them start thinking about taking time away from everything.
We always think we have to be here all the time. We don't. We don't. Now, do we have to prepare for it? Yeah, worse, can't just up and say I'm out. Two days before clients don't really like that. But if you wanted to take a week long vacation six months from now, what would that look like? How would you do that? Could that be a goal? Of course it could. Could you that would give you six months to warn your clients try to reschedule things. Could you make videos or slps, or some kind of process paperwork so that you can give the things over to your team so they know what's going on. That could also make you very happy to not have to work all day. If you started delegating things to other people. This could be a gateway process. What do you need to make that happen? Put it on the calendar and make it a priority. It's possible. I have to do this myself. We were talking a couple weeks ago about being more intentional with time and how we're spending it and it really I kept thinking I don't really want to take two weeks away unless we're able to travel. You know, like being home. I live at the beach. It's great. But I don't need a whole full two weeks, I would get antsy just sitting in the house, right. But taking every Friday off all summer, and having lunch and a drink at the beach. Yeah, I could do that. How do I get that to happen? That's one of my goals for this year. What do you want to do? How do you want to get away? And then how do you want to spend your own time? Like, do you have hobbies that you really you really miss? Do you want to work on things? Do you want to learn things? Do you want to do new things? Do you want to learn how to do something? What My big things for the for the summer roll for all year really is gardening. Great for my sanity. Great to get me moving, wonderful hobby. And I can relax in it. How do I fit that time in to get things done? So I'm not always saying, Oh, I can't get these things done. I just don't have the time. Make the time first. Can one of your goals be getting help in your business? How do you want to grow your business over the next year? Does that mean creating a team? One of your goals could be bringing on two team members to take off certain projects? Or take them off your hands? What if you don't want to hustle all the time? And a lot of these are melding together, right? If you got help, you know, you don't have to work nights anymore. And then you could also take vacations.

So a lot of these goals will work together, which is why I'm saying we can't make goals in a vacuum. What do you really want to do? What a cleaning lady really just makes your life so much better? Or getting groceries delivered? Yes. It was a huge help for me and just freeing up that time, or just the stress of like one more thing on your list that sucks? Are there things for professional development? Is there some kind of learning that you want? Do you think that your life or business would be better if you got some kind of certification or learned a software or finished your degree all of those things? What kind of goals can you have there to make all the other things work better? How about your community? Are you missing all of the good things happening around you? Because you're too busy working? Does that mean seeing your friends for socially distance happy hour every Saturday in the driveway? That's what we do. It's been an enormous help to have happy hour every Saturday with my neighbors. It was something to look forward to and the real hard times in the beginning of the lockdown. And now I have real friends that I barely knew these people. And now I hang out with them a lot. And it's great. And it's nice to have that community right outside. Are there other things that you've wanted to do in your community? Are there people you wanted to see your organization's you wanted to get involved in, put those as goals? I want to do this this year. And then finally, financials. And I know we started by saying I don't focus on your financial goals. But that's not what I mean. I mean, what do you need for your financials to be really in a good place? Do you want to pay off all debt? Do you want to save up for a big purchase? Maybe you just want to create more profitability or business so that you're not working so many hours. That's a different goal. Those are different financial goals. Just as important. Pay off your debt. Oh my god, that'd be fantastic, right? Look at all the stress that would melt away from not having that over your head. So I want you to really think through this list and make goals around all of these things. If they're important to you. Make them your goals, not somebody else's goals. I promise you will be a ton a ton happier. Making these things priorities, not just that one priority, you will probably feel a ton less guilt about all the things you're dropping, which is gold. Your family will be happier if you're not cranky, and they get to see you. And you may even find out that freeing up your mind lets it come up with a lot of crazy ideas for new things and you might just get excited about your business again.

Good luck out there. Go make some goals. I'll see you next week. Thanks for joining me this week on the sink handle podcast. I can't wait to do all of this again next week. Make sure to visit us at ReynoldsOBM.com for the show notes on anything we talked about today. If you love or you mostly like the show, please subscribe and rate us on iTunes so we can help more people avoid the Sink Handle.