Realize Your Goals By Compressing Them Into Daily Systems
Leading indicators are indicators that change before a business or economy as a whole change.
They're activity-based indicators that show the health of a system in advance of the outcome.
In business, revenue is a lagging indicator, while daily prospecting calls or weekly recruitment phone interviews are leading indicators.
Goals are realized when they're built on an executable system performed daily.
When you establish a daily system, you make incremental improvements that compound over time.
That's why I try to compress all my goals down to the day. I execute them as part of a daily or weekly system.
Here's how you can break down your goals into a daily system:
Long terms goals: I create a list of all my big hairy audacious goals (BHAG). These are my "10x" goals taking Grant Cardone's advice. One of my BHAGs is having a group of companies that exceed $100,000,000 in yearly revenue.
Yearly goals: I break down my big goals into five to ten yearly goals. An example of business goals is to make me unnecessary into day-to-day activities at Skylink and acquire one to two companies.
Quarterly goals: I then set three to six Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for each quarter to push towards my yearly goals. An example for this quarter is launching our customer portal, which is broken down into six key results we'll measure to determine the objective's success.
Monthly priorities: My OKRs are broken down by the month to make incremental progress throughout the quarter.
Weekly priorities: I set five weekly priorities to push my OKRs forward.
Up until this point, everything is a distraction. It's more planning, less doing. More thinking, less executing.
According to Scott Adams,
"Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.
Successful goals are well-executed systems.
I try to create systems to realize all my goals, which leads to,
Daily priorities: My systems are executed daily at best or weekly at worst.
Here are some examples of goals turned into daily systems.
I will acquire two to three businesses in the next two years, so I set a weekly outreach goal. I then make calls, send messages and turn on an outreach system to help create acquisition leads every day.
To lead a successful group of companies, we must generate massive awareness, so I aim to publish at least 250 words a day executed through a daily writing and publishing system.
Compress your goals down to the day by executing systems. That's where your goals will be realized, through the actions your systems generate, every day.