Set Your Goals – Coffee Break

The 90 Day Goals Planner

A true “fireside chat”, Devani and I share here how it is that we came to create the very first iCreateDaily 90 Day Goals Journal. From just an idea thanks to inspiration and suggestions from the iCreateDaily community recommendations, to completion and fruition in less than two months!

Whether you choose our journal or some other goal setting template, it’s super important to use tools that will help keep you on track.

Our top two tools now:

• 90 Day Goals Journal
• iCreateDaily Creator’s Challenge & Mastermind group – where being accountable to others is the best way to get stuff done!
• Coffee Break 3 New Years Resolutions?

Keeping goals in your head is the fastest way to kick that dream down the road. So whether you choose our 90 Day Goals Journal or some other system… do it! You won’t regret it!

We also share how getting it out there is better than getting it perfect. In fact, fast implementation and iterations are the fastest way to grow and improve!

We’d love to hear from you! Please leave your review on iTunes and send us an email with questions, ideas and feedback.

Cheers and let’s rock 2018!!

Links:

• 90 Day Goals Journal
• April Berry’s Website – the freelance graphic designer who helped bring our journal to life!
• Toggl.com Time Tracking

Full Transcription:

Devani: [00:00:42] Hello and welcome to The iCreateDaily Podcast. I’m Devani Alderson and I’m LeAura Alderson and we are here today doing a coffee break episode.

[00:00:53] So cheer! Grab your favorite drink and..

LeAura: Sorry to interrupt her second, for the people who are on audio only. We are literally Fire side. So on video you fire an audio. You may have heard some of the wood dropping but it is January 3rd 2018 and very cold here in North Carolina today so we’re enjoying doing that literally a coffee break fireside chat.

Devani: [00:01:20] Yes these coffee breaks are shorter episodes. We call them coffee breaks because generally we’re drinking tea, coffee whatever beverage. And what we want to do with these is publisher a Coffee Break once a week in-between our longer form interviews that we do with other artists. And so LeAura and I generally just stick to a 15-20 minute episode and we talk about goals that we’re working on, projects that we’ve done, people we love and admire people, quotes quotes that we love and admire different things we’re doing just as our creative endeavors grows. iCreateDaily brand grows.

[00:02:02] And yes the latest thing we’ll be talking about is something that just arrived literally today. And if you follow us you may have seen this already on our Facebook page. iCreateDaily Facebook page but wanted to share it because many people may not have. So you’re on audio we’re holding the book up now. You’ll be able to see it on video, but we have received in the mail today our first ever 90 Day Goals Journal that we created and how they came to be. Is that when we ran Conducted or what you call participated in it.

Devani [00:02:38] Hosted. Here’s a closeup of the journal.

LeAura [00:02:35] Thank you. Looking for the word. Well have pictures.When we hosted our first beta version of the creators challenge. It was a 100 day challenge and the feedback from our members was that they really preferred it to be 90 days or 30 days, so that it would be in sync with calendar months and the calendar quarters and we kind of like the idea ourselves. And so while we had a plate full of goals or a list full of goals to accomplish ourselves for our own challenge because were participating in it along with our members, we added that to our plate and got it done. So basically about a month and a half we came up with and created our own 90 Day Goals Journal, and we’re really thrilled with it came out really good. The graphic designer is April Berry. She’s a freelance graphic designer. She’s a fantastic job for inexpensively and reasonable price I should say. Yes so, basically you create your 90 day goals. So you decide on if it’s going to be a macro goal anywhere between 1 to 3 for instance, or 1 to 5 macro goals, that you want to accomplish during the next 90 days. Then you break it down into what you get accomplished per month. So you have a 30 day goal and then you have within the 30 days, you break it down into four weeks and then you also have weekly pages with a single day per page.

Devani [00:04:02] And if you’re in the video I’m holding some of these up we’ll have sample photos of the various pages that you can look thru on our Web site. So you’re listening to the audio. This might be a really good episode to hop over to YouTube or our Web site and watch the video because this journal is a visual journal. And another thing we in a couple questions of people who are they don’t necessarily classify themselves as a creator or as an artist. While ICreateDaily Brand is for creation of any type, including business, including fitness, whatever you want to do this for anybody who wants to accomplish anything.

LeAura [00:04:50] Yeah and anytime. So while we were really glad to have it available for the first quarter of 2018, if you see this or learn about it you know like in February or January 16th or whenever it is for you, it can be 90 days from the moment you receive the Journal. And what we actually created was a digital version that’s writeable or printable, so you can print it and write on it yourself or you can write on it with your computer. So some of us like, I tend to be digital on almost everything these days, and one of the reasons I like the writable PDF is because I like to copy and paste some of the tasks I’m doing directly into my Toggl. We use, Devani and I use a tool called Toggl time tracker to help us keep on track with, in particular Devani uses it for her clients for tracking billable work to make sure that her hours that she’s working serving each client is billed correctly.

[00:05:43] I use it to keep me accountable and to know where my time’s going including that the time holes, the black holes that swallow the time that you know that you don’t want to lose.

Devani [00:05:55] Which is also pretty integral to accomplishing goals whereas a 90 day goal of one month goal that you have, knowing where your time is spent is a really good stepping stone of figuring out where to close those gaps. And if you’re somebody who’s like doing everything and wants to do more things it helps you sort of learn what you can cut out of your day or week or month and replace with habits that help you achieve your goal.

LeAura [00:06:20] Yeah. And so what we have in the journal is, again basically so every day has a quote for inspiration a line for gratitude. That is something that’s pretty popular in journals these days. And it’s something that we’ve done on our own as well for many years actually. It’s so powerful. Then we have a repeat you rewrite the 90 day goal so you can remember what your bigger picture vision is and sort of like we use a lot of vocations and affirmations because the power of thought and practicing in our mind what we want to see done is real. You know it really makes a difference. And so yes so we and this is divided into three months and it has a table of contents. One of the things I really like about the writable journal is the digital version is it has a table content and you can click from a table of contents directly to the relevant page or the relevant week. So it has some dynamic capabilities there as well. And then it has Day 7, where there’s two pages on each day 7 of all the different weeks that allows you to do more writing as well as some text print to see if I can get that video for you. Yes. Is where it allows you to have some something for inspiration and reflection. So like sort of like thought starters on something to meditate on. So something to reflect on.

Devani [00:07:45] And we’ll put up a bunch of photos so that you don’t have to try and read it or see what we put up on the screen that is just for your visual while we were talking. Also, some of you might be like ‘I’m not really a journal’er, I don’t really do that stuff,’ I completely agree. I don’t. I’ve never really been into journaling even though I want to pursue creative writing. Keeping a journal hasn’t been my thing I’ve never done a lot of that. People find daily writing, morning pages, a productive thing and I’ve just never fallen into that particular habit. But what I love about this is creating a structure and I’ve already started mine with creating. It just helps you create a structure and write down and have that tangible visual representation of how you spend your time. And for me it also helps me practice my handwriting which I find fun just in general but in grains this is what I need to be practicing, these are the habits I need to be establishing, these are the things I need to do day in and day out to accomplish building a brand to accomplish finishing a project writing the book, showing up everyday, to do a piece of art, whatever it is for you, writing music. And so even if you don’t journal a lot of these are just short jotting down notes of what you need to do which I find as somebody who doesn’t do long form handwriting very helpful just to clear clear your mind. Figure out what to do and so yeah it might convert you. Non-journalers, to journaling.  

LeAura [00:09:21] Yeah. And you know while reading the session I know we’re talking it’s like hopefully this doesn’t seem like a long commercial because part of the purpose is whether it’s our journal that you use where some other journal, journaling is helping you keep track and make sure you get things done and also in particular with creatives with solo-preneurs, entrepreneurs. So we have so many things to do and we were so many hot in our business in this fast paced day and age that it’s so easy to get overwhelmed. So the thing about journaling whether again is digital or hand written is that it not only helps you create an organized plan for accomplishing your goals but it gets it out of your head so that you free up that mind space to do the work the do. And then to know what you need to do on any given day. So we’d love to hear from you guys on what you’re using for your journalling if you’re doing it how that’s working for you what kind of drilling practices you like to do if you don’t have one and want to try it. We hope you would click the link in order hours that would be awesome.

[00:10:29] But the other part of it wanted to share is that we when we started to challenge our first beta challenge with our members last September 5th or 6th I forget which date, anyway last September we had no plan whatsoever in our head for creating a journal had no plan no thought of doing that. And it was because the members in our challenge wanted something like that as did we that we decided to ‘OK we’ll just create it!’ We’re going to add that to our list. We know it’s fresh in our minds what we need is fresh in our minds what would work well. We’ve got these people who are asking us for this kind of thing. So we just out until this we get it done so. So it really is. Just testament to the power of focus and focusing on her goals and. Are you counting for them and tracking them in a way that helps you really hope to get it done. So whatever it is for you and whatever you want to get done that you’ve been putting off for that hasn’t been manifesting the way you want it to. Keeping your career goals and keeping a goals journal is a great way to get it done.

Devani [00:11:37] And what’s amazing about these is that it’s written on paper it’s not written on stone which means if you get into a goal and realize that ‘hey you know this is really cool but this isn’t the exact thing I want to accomplish,’ It allows the flexibility of changing directions because that’s life. You know we set these goals because we think we want a certain outcome and oftentimes we dive into the project not knowing that maybe what we were actually looking for was just a different journey to help us develop and grow and that’s what many of our creative members in our groups have talked about just starting the process of committing to a goal. Help them refine what they were actually looking for and seeking for on the journey of. Accomplishing. Yeah.

LeAura [00:12:24] And invariably every single one of us who participated in the challenge ended up revising our goals and refining them. And you know many times they were not nearly they weren’t realistic. We put so many more things than we could realistically get done. And so we did that with one a couple of things. For instance we started out thinking that we were going to publish a daily podcast right out the gate and that’s still our goal but we’re a long way from that. So our goal now is to publish three per week. We have one ideally on Mondays that’s an interview the Wednesdays will be our coffee break and the Fridays will be an interview. So that’s our goal and that’s what we’re trying to work toward making sure we’re consistent with that and then slowly add in the others. But what we do the other thing like we said earlier we did accomplish creating a whole thing that we didn’t even expect to do simply because we had the structure in the organization around how to get it done. So definitely you know it’s like we really know with the new year it feels like a fresh start and just know that no matter what time of year you are seeing or hearing this podcast it’s a new day. And you can start like one of our recent coffee breaks we talked about that we’ll link to that episode but the new day is today. So this day begins a new year from this moment forward no matter whether it’s January 1st or September 30 first.

[00:13:51] So at any moment in any day of the year you have a chance to start fresh.

[00:13:57] So OK so whatever system that you choose to use moving forward we hope you the best in accomplishing your goals when you’re listening to this and come out what your goals for the year are and we would love to use them. Yeah. Thank you. Bye guys.