How to Detect a Focus Level

When it comes to planning life goals, it is easy to become focused on one particular time frame, such as looking at day-to-day matters, while leaving longer-term frames of reference, such as annual goals, or even longer-term plans stagnating until it becomes too late to manage them as effectively as one could have. By analyzing your overall process of decision-making, you can detect whether your focus takes more than one time frame into account.

Instructions

• 1

  Review your lifetime goals and determine what you believe to be your purpose in life and whether or not you have made progress toward that goal. Write down your purpose,and record the steps you have made in that direction. If you are still a bit vague on what your life purpose is, because you've never considered it -- think about the causes that drive you. Consider ways that this purpose is present in your passions and develop a sentence that encapsulates your life purpose.

• 2

  Pull out a calendar and look at the next six to 12 months. Whether you already knew your life purpose or have just begun to formulate one, it's time to determine whether or not you have planned to take steps toward that purpose in the next two quarters or even the next year. Review (or make) a list of semi-annual or annual goals and, next to each goal, write a phrase connecting that goal to your life purpose.

• 3

  Move to the daily and weekly levels of focus. While some of these goals will focus on mundane matters, they all contribute in some way toward your greater life purpose. It's true that getting the oil changed will not help you change the way that family law is practiced in your state, for example, but maintaining your family's security and safety in this way is a basic requirement for pursuing any long-term goals. Look at your planner daily and make sure that your daily and weekly goals mesh with your larger picture.