The 90 day productivity hack

The key objective is that a 90 day goal cycle prevents you from getting overwhelmed with too many long term goals, and instead breaks the year into quarters during which you’re more able to achieve your objectives.

In addition, the 90 time frame is tight enough that it forces you to review you progress as you go, and stay focused on your goal. That’s why businesses tend to be built around quarterly progress updates: and there’s no reason you can’t adopt the same mentality for yourself and your business.

If you can set apart thirty minutes a day to focus on gaining a new skill or learning a process you can also make leaps and bounds forward with quarterly goals that don’t eat up too much of your daily time – making them a realistic commitment. If you manage to set apart 30 minutes each morning, you’ll have spent up to forty-five hours learning a skill or accomplishing a task at the end of the quarter!

Here’s how to build up ninety-day goals you can start working on today:

1. Review your goals

What is that you’d like to achieve in the next year? Make sure your goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound, and ensure they fit into the vision and overarching objective you have for your business and self.

You’ll need to create a plan for each of these goals and how you could achieve them. For instance, if you’d like to create a whitepaper to promote your business with, what will you need to learn and do to make it happen? You should have no more than three big goals for twelve months, and you can then break those three goals into the steps needed to reach them.

Each of those steps can then filter into your ninety day stretches to make them achievable and keep you motivated.

2. Review your strategic plan

Once you’ve laid out your goals, make sure they fit into your strategic, long term plan. How will they feed into the direction you’d like your business to move in? What’s your vision statement, and what are your core values?

If your goals don’t move you in the right direction, it might be worth rethinking them, and analysing whether or not they’re your best option for the long run.

3. Lay out your first 90 days

Once you have SMART goals which are relevant and applicable to your businesses strategic plan, lay out which elements of them you’d like to accomplish over the next quarter. It’s best to pick 2-3 goals per quarter, which will feed into your main three goals for the year.

From there, break them down into 30, 60 and ninety day goals – after all, few things are more motivational than ticking off goals!

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Let us know in the comments what you’d like to achieve in the next ninety days, and which tactics you use to achieve your goals.

- Lena Klein