After much thought and procrastination, I finally have my first two goals… in writing. On this virtual paper. They may seem vigorous, but working toward something – like these goals – will certainly push me toward something better (even if I never achieve the goal). Anyhow, after no post for  more than a week, I present the following goals.

Goal 1:

Earn a passive income using recommendations by Pat Flynn.

I want to achieve this goal because it will help me become independent from both my parents and the needs of any company where I am employed. I will also gain a strong entrepreneurial mindset which will propel me toward more and more difficult, adventuresome, and rewarding goals. I will also improve my writing, organization, internet, and time management skills. I can apply these skills anywhere!

This goal is so big, I will break it down into smaller goals. What I will do is use one of Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income techniques and just go with it for several weeks. The first, well, sub-goals that I will work toward is the following:

Goal 1A:

Write twenty articles on  InfoBarrel.com. 

Period1: 29 March – 26 April (four weeks).

Pat Flynn recommends this technique in his podcast SPI 015 listed on his page Getting Started with Smart Passive Income. I don’t have any expectations on how much money I will earn or how well received my articles will be. I just want to get in the habit of writing and publishing on the web (and get the feeling of what its like to make a little money online too).

Here I use Habit Alignment Technology (TM) from The Habit Factor to list my new habits:

Goal 2:

Get a better job.

Period1: 29 March – 26 April (four weeks).

This is quite a significant goal for me. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I currently have two jobs that pay near minimum wage. It is time to start climbing the ladder. Even if I achieve Goal 1, there are many great lessons that I can learn by working toward Goal 2 –such as how I to improve my interviewing skills, what the best cover letter looks like, and how to get over rejection (since my resume will be rejected by the majority of employers). I will also discover all my strong and weak points and use these as lessons… which I can post as InfoBarrel.com articles 😉

Here is the Habit Alignment Technology chart for Goal 2:

Even though I should only have five habits maximum (find out why in The Habit Factor), updating the Habit Factor Tracking Sheet is one of the most basic parts of the whole Habit Factor system… so I decided to include six habits.

Although the habit of getting to my current job ten minutes early may seem like it has no relevance to Goal 2, it may be one of the more significant employment factors. Arriving at all obligations early shows that you are able to manage time and that the obligation is important to you. I tend to get to rush to work every day. Some days I get there a minute early. Some days I get there a few minutes late. If I get a new job, I will probably do the same thing. So what I will do is start getting the feel of arriving at every obligation early. Everything else is prep toward getting interviews and looking good in the interviews.

Article Time Report 3

I was only able to do 2.3 words per minute for this article. If I finished this article in one sitting, it may have been much higher. Then again, I did include many charts. Once I get the hang of writing and including charts, the rate may go up.

A

The first thing I did was get the Habit Factor Tracking sheet from my email, added this to Google Docs, and formatted it to make it blog-friendly. The original chart is great if I were to print it out, but since I am inserting it into this blog, I need to conserve every pixel to keep it readable.

B

I input and formatted the Habit Factor Tracking sheet (tested the sheet – took it off).

Conclusion

The biggest problem I had with writing this article was procrastination. Some of it was intentional (I started to work on it and started doing something else), and unintentional (tired from work so I didn’t even feel like coming online).

For this program to work, I need to make time to come online. If my work schedule does not change, I may try to get up earlier (4am instead of 5). Otherwise I may just fall asleep at night before completing anything and lose that check on the Habit Factor tracking sheet.

Thanks for reading this article!

What two habits would you work on first?