What is an easy way to keep track of the life goals that I want to practice daily?

The best thing I ever did for myself was write down my goals for the MONTH.

Not the year.

The MONTH.

A little background: I am extremely ADD.  Whether or not I'm chemically imbalanced in the brain (several doctors have affirmed that I am) is still up for debate, but my interests range from classical piano to digital marketing, rap and hip-hop to competitive gaming.  I am a renaissance man with a severe case of obsessive-competative disorder.  Everything I do, I do to the max degree, learning as much as I possibly can about it and eventually taking it to a point where it could be a possible career path.

This makes focusing in on 1 single goal extremely difficult.

I have tried everything.  I have tried to do everything at once—and I'm very good at time management, giving myself an hour to work on music, two hours to write my book, an hour to prep my meals and 2 hours in the gym, etc.  But the truth is, you can really only do one big goal at a time.  Your brain needs to obsess over it.  You need to embody the goal.  You have to allow the craft to move through you—you can't force brilliance (and I use that word flagrantly).

So, I decided to start honing in on goals 1 by 1, and I wrote them down.

First, I started for my goals for the year.

Meh, too big.  3 days in and I was up to something else.

Then I tried goals for the day.

Too small, too much tunnel-visioning.  Great for task lists, horrible for setting for the future.

Then I tried setting goals for the MONTH.

This was the perfect balance.

Because I noticed about a week into the month, I would start to go haywire.  "What if I should REALLY be focusing on THIS?  What if THIS isn't what I WANT?  Maybe I should do more of THIS INSTEAD!"  I was all over the place.  But then I'd flip back to my goals for the month and realize that I was stressing because I wasn't sticking to the course—a course that wasn't very far off and easily achievable with just a little bit of consistency.

A month is a good amount of time to judge your progress. It is long enough that it gives you time to practice aiming for something in the future, but not so small that you get lost in the day-to-day minutia.  Once you get a good hold of this, you can then set goals for the year, 6 months, even diving each year up into quarters like a business and saying, "Ok for Q1, here are my goals."

Once you have your month goals laid out, I suggest mapping out the week.Sunday is a good day for this.  Sit down with a pen and paper and ask yourself, "What do I have to get done this week to help me reach that monthly goal?"

Then each day, have your to-do list. You should take solace in this to-do list.  It is comforting knowing that as long as you keep checking off those boxes, you are moving towards your monthly/bigger goals.  

Do this planning right before bed, each night.  It takes 5 minutes.  And since it's the last thing your brain takes in before going to sleep, it will marinate in your subconscious.  You'll wake up the next morning and know exactly what you need to do.

Get to work!