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If you constantly fall behind with your goal, perhaps the goal you’re pursuing isn’t that important to you or you need to give up on other goals to make time for this objective.
If you can’t make time for your goal but you find time to do other things, it signals that your motivation isn’t strong enough or that your objective is no longer a priority for you. If you’d like to work on your goal, but other things constantly distract you, you need to give up on those things to make time for your key goal.
We’ve already talked about the ineffectiveness of spreading yourself too thin. Just as trying to do several things at once reduces your performance, so does chasing too many goals.
Think of it as growing bonsai trees. If you have a hundred trees and your friend Jane has one, who’s going to have more beautiful trees? You, (constantly moving from one tree to another and then rushing back to the previous one, only to have to attend to the other one again) or Jane, who has all the time and focus in the world to make her single tree perfect?
I’m not advocating that you should give up on everything. It isn’t realistic or sensible to forego your family obligations, your job, and your health to focus on a single goal. However, if you’re working on several “priority” goals at once, you’ll be unlikely to treat them all as true priorities. A priority is a thing that is regarded as more important than another. You don’t have true priorities if you have an endless list of priorities.
Playing catch-up is an obvious sign that your attention is spread too thin. Things won’t change unless you give up on something. It’s your choice: multiple goals and mediocre performance or few goals and excellence.
1. If you’re constantly playing catch-up with your goal, it indicates that it isn’t a priority to you or that you have too much on your plate. If you can find time for other things, but rarely for your supposedly important goal, perhaps you no longer care about the goal as you used to and it might be better to give up.
2. You’ll maximize your results if you forego some of the less important goals and focus more on your key objective. In the end, you’ll need to choose between multiple goals and mediocre performance or few goals and excellence.
