What are Goal Charts?

Goal charts are a simple and effective way to measure your progress toward any given goal. They come in many different shapes and sizes. You can make them or you can buy them. The reason they are so important is because it gives you a visual aide to keep you motivated to accomplish your goals. Imagine, for a moment, what it would feel like to look at your chart and see you have made real progress in the direction of your dreams. If you could see the progress you have made, wouldn’t you be more motivated to continue working towards that goal? Of course you would.

In this article, I am going to discuss my favorite kind of goal chart. The sticky goal chart. I have used many different goal charts, but this is my favorite. It is easy to make, it is easy to follow and for me it is highly motivating. This is the type of chart I used to build my website.

All you need to make this type of chart is a piece of poster board, an ink pen and Post-Its of varying size and color. The size of your poster board will depend on the size of your goal. I sometimes use two large poster boards. One for my to do tasks and one for my finished tasks.

What you want to do, is to label your poster board with whatever your goal may be. So the title on my poster board would read “Positive Website Pages to Complete”. My other poster board would read “Completed Web pages”. If your goal is to lose weight yours may read “weight to lose” or “Fitting Into My Skinny Jeans”. It is up to you as to how creative you want to be.

The next thing you want to do is to label your bigger Post-It’s with the larger tasks you need to accomplish to reach your goal. Some of my large Post-It’s include topics like positive thinking articles, goal setting articles, creative visualization articles and so on. For your weight loss goal, some of your Larger Post-It’s may say things like week one, week two, week three and so on. Once this is done place your Post-It’s across the top of your poster board in a horizontal row.

Now, it is time to move on to the little Post-It’s. This is where you write your smaller tasks. I would have under my main task of goal setting articles something like achieving your goals, making goal charts, tracking goals and so on. For your weight loss goal you might have under week one something like walk a mile, drink 3 glasses of water a day, eat breakfast daily and so on and so on. Once you have done this place the smaller Post-It tasks in a vertical line below the bigger Post-It it correlates with.

Once this is done, your goal chart is complete and now comes the fun part. Focus on one big task and it’s smaller task at a time. Find one of the smaller Post-It’s you want to focus on and do that task. Once it is done you may take it from your to do board and place it on the completed board. Once all the small goals are done then take the big task Post-It and move it to the completed board. Before you know it, you will have a board full of completed tasks and you will have reached your overall goal.

There are a hundred types of goal charts. The one you use is not important. What is important, is that you find one that works for you by motivating you to take action in the direction of your goals and to keep taking action in the direction of your goals.