Keep track of your goals

When updating your goal, you can keep track of all your progress, setbacks, ideas, and thoughts related to your goal. All of these updates are stored in sequential order, giving you a log of your efforts over time to achieve your goal. You can look over your past entries and learn from your previous mistakes and failures. It is basically a blog dedicated to your specific improvement goal. The fact that there is a dedicated space for you to keep track of your goal (outside of your personal thoughts), makes it harder for you to forget and move on from your goal.

Aggregate knowledge (learn) about your goal

Each channel is an area for people to post information, advice, questions, tips, and stories about that particular area of self-improvement. The most useful posts are decided upon by the community by voting. If you have a question that your friends can’t answer, you can ask everyone else in the Dreamdone community who is working on a similar goal. You can read stories or advice on how other people have managed to meet their personal goals. You can find some of the most useful info (specific to your goal) from around the web that has been aggregated by the Dreamdone community.

Create a community of support

When you publicly declare your intention to achieve a goal on Dreamdone, that declaration is not forgotten. It stays on the site for you and your friends to remember. Every update on your goal is shared with whatever friends you feel need to know about that goal. Your friends can see all of your progress, setbacks, and thoughts. With this info they can give you informed advice and encouragement. They can see the history of your efforts on that goal to be well informed on your past efforts and well as future hopes relating to that goal. Normally when working on a goal, friends only hear the advice that you happen to sporadically tell them individually. With Dreamdone, a group of your friends can collectively be informed on your ongoing efforts to achieve that goal. Using that info, they can offer superior advice and encouragement than they would before.

Go to the Facebook App, name your goal, choose a channel, choose who you what to be able to see your goal, then start updating your progress. Help out your friends. Get involved in the channels. Achieve your dream.

Specific – Answer as many of these questions as possible: who, what, where, when, why, how. Explicitly state the details of what you what to achieve in a clear and easy manner.

Measurable – If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Figure out exactly how success will be measured. Establish the key metrics to track while you make progress.

Attainable – Set a goal that is ambitious, but still realistic. You want to challenge yourself while knowing that success is possible.

Relevant – Make sure your goal is relevant to your needs. A deep internal motivation must drive you forward in the pursuit of your goal.

Timely – Put your goal within a time frame. Make a definate start and end point to eliminate procrastination.

Some not so SMART goals:

• Get in shape
• Stop smoking
• Spend more time with the family

And some SMART goals:

• Lose 10 pounds within the next 2 months
• Only smoke one cigarette per day
• Dedicate 2 nights out of the week to be with the family

Try your best to make your goals SMART!

Now we can set a goal in each category:

• Career – Find a better job
• Physical – Lose 20 pounds
• Emotional – Become less stressed
• Financial – Get out of credit card debt
• Family – Spend more time with the kids
• Spiritual – Find ‘Inner Peace’

As we start to look at these goals together as a group, we can see how the categories that we created are not so clear. Most, if not all, of these individual goals depend on other goals to be completed. For example; to lose 20 pounds, we may have to adopt a lower stress way to live (since excess stress can lead to weight gain). To spend more time with our kids, it may require us to get a better job that gives us more free time. Finding inner peace may allow us to come to the realization the we don’t need to use our credit card for trivial purchases as much.

Even if your goals aren’t strictly mutually dependent, adopting a holistic approach to life improvement is much more effective. When you are working on multiple goals at once, you experience success on a more regular basis. Regular positive feedback and balanced life improvement creates a more sustainable environment for achieving your goals. So make sure that you take the time to think about how your goals are related to one another before developing a plan to start working on them.