2025 April 15 Using time to your advantage

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Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about the last section of SMART goals, the T part. So let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

I hope everyone’s having a good week. This is Holy Week if you’re a Christian or Catholic. We just had Palm Sunday, and we’re coming into Easter. So if you celebrate, I wish you a good Easter season. Actually, a good Easter season to everybody!

Welcome back to our ongoing conversation about SMART goals and how they can help you create the life you want. Over the past few weeks, we've been breaking down each letter of the SMART acronym and exploring how each element contributes to creating goals that actually work.

To recap, we started with S, specific goals—ensuring that your goal is clearly defined rather than something vague. Then we covered M for measurable—creating ways to track your progress. We discussed A for achievable and actionable—making sure your goal is realistic while still having concrete next steps. Then we talked about R for relevant or reach. A relevant goal is one that actually matters to you, something that fits into your actual vision for your life, while reach is about pushing yourself a little harder to get there. It gives you more satisfaction when you achieve it and tends to be more motivating.

Today we're wrapping it up with T, which is time-based—meaning your goal has a clear deadline or timeframe associated with it. This might seem like a simple concept, but it's often the missing piece that prevents many people from achieving their goals. If you don't set a good deadline, then there's no real reason to get started. 

Why do deadlines matter so much? Why can't we just say, I'll get around to it or I'll do it when I'm ready? If you don’t set a goal, it never becomes important enough to start. There are several important reasons why adding a timeframe to your goals makes a tremendous difference.

First, deadlines create a sense of urgency. There's something about knowing you have to get something done by a specific date or complete something by a set time that motivates you to action. Without a deadline, it's too easy to keep pushing things off to someday or maybe later. And that someday often just never seems to arrive. We've all experienced this. There’s probably a task on your to-do list—certainly on mine—that you've been meaning to do for years, but haven’t gotten around to because there’s no real pressure to complete it by any particular time.

Second, deadlines really help with planning. When you know you need to accomplish something by a specific date, you can work backwards to figure out what needs to happen and when. This is very similar to what we talk about in life envisionment and goal planning. On a higher level, if you start at the end—at where you want to be, what your real goal is—and work backwards, a lot of the problems you think might arise become clearer sooner, and so they’re easier to solve. 

Working backwards is especially important with larger goals that require multiple steps. The example we often use is travel—you want to take a trip somewhere. Let’s say you want to go to Europe. If your goal is someday I’ll visit Europe, it remains a dream. There's nothing to it. Someday I’ll visit Europe somewhere.

But if your goal is I want to take a two-week trip to Europe next September, suddenly you can start planning. You have a real target. You have a timeframe. And there’s a sense of urgency about getting things done. You know you need to save a certain amount of money by a certain date, pick destinations, maybe apply for or renew your passport, schedule time to travel—suddenly all these things become very tangible.

A deadline helps you break down a goal into manageable steps with your own little mini-deadlines. And deadlines create accountability. When you set a specific timeframe, you make a commitment to yourself. You tend to be more accountable when you've established clear expectations of what needs to be accomplished.

When you’re wishy-washy with yourself, you give your brain a reason to make excuses very early in the process. When you've set a very specific timeframe for a very specific goal with a very specific outcome, you’ve taken away all that wiggle room. So now you’re very much accountable for what’s going to happen—and your brain wants you to succeed. So once you make something very specific, your brain knows what it has to do.

You’ve taken away all the excuses, and we’ll find a way to do it. Accountability works even better when you share a deadline with someone else. If you tell a friend, I’m going to finish writing my family history by Christmas, you’ve created this external accountability and expectation—and you don’t want to disappoint somebody else.

It’s not something to put pressure on yourself, but you don’t want to disappoint your friends, so you’ll probably work a little harder than you might otherwise. That’s why mastermind groups and accountability groups work so well—especially accountability groups that you pay to be part of. And even then, it’s not like you owe anyone else in the group anything—everybody paid their dues, it’s just other people there.

But there’s something about human nature—when you commit to other people that you’ll do something by a certain time, you just don’t want to disappoint them. So accountability to external forces—other people, other friends—is a very good motivating factor.

Fourth, deadlines help you prioritize. We all have a limited amount of time and energy, and without deadlines, it’s easy to spend that time on whatever seems the most urgent or appealing at the moment, rather than what’s most important to your goals. When everything has a deadline, you can better decide what really needs your attention now, and what can wait.

When you can see conflicts in priorities, you’ll notice them sooner. Because once you’ve set these different deadlines, all of a sudden you can see that you have a big task coming up, but also two other tasks with deadlines around the same timeframe.

It can’t happen. So even before you get there, you have time to reprioritize things, to see which ones are really most aligned with your goals, and get things back in order. That way, you don’t end up in those situations where you tried to lay out this nice schedule, but forgot that you have some big event in your life, and now nothing can get done.

Then you feel like, I’ve failed. I can’t even do goals. Instead, three weeks earlier, when you first signed up for that event, you could’ve thought, Oh wow, I have all these other goals now. You could’ve made adjustments. It leaves you feeling more positive and in control, rather than at the mercy of an arbitrary schedule you hadn’t really looked into before.

So deadlines are really important. They help you prioritize things.

We keep talking about timeframes in the abstract, but there are really a couple different types of timeframes to consider, and they each serve a different purpose.

First, there are completion deadline timeframes. This is what we often think of when we hear the word deadline. This is the date by which you want to have something fully, completely done—when you want to achieve your goal. I’ll save $5,000 for a down payment by December, or I’ll run a 5K race by June. There’s a very definitive time, and these deadlines give you a clear target to work toward.

Then there are progress checkpoints, or milestone-type deadlines. They can still be time-based—they’re intermediate deadlines that help you stay on track toward your main goal. These are especially useful if you have a really big goal. If it’s too big, it just becomes abstract to your mind. I want to write my memoir.

Well, that could take a year if it’s not your number one priority. So if you set mini milestones, like I’m going to complete the outline by February, I’ll finish the first three chapters by April, complete the draft by August—and you lay things out in little steps—these intermediate or milestone deadlines are really helpful on larger goals.

Progress checkpoints also allow you to celebrate the small wins along the way. We’ve talked about this a lot—this is what helps you maintain motivation. Your brain loves to win. Your brain loves to see you happy and successful. So when you have little steps along the way, you can celebrate those. Yay! I can go out and buy a new pen to keep writing on my memoir, or whatever it is. That keeps you motivated.

They also give you a chance to evaluate your progress and adjust your approach. If you think, I should be able to write a chapter a week, and three weeks in you’re just finishing your first chapter, you may be thinking, Hm… maybe this is a little harder than I expected. Maybe a chapter a week was a little too aggressive. Well, now you can adjust the goal so you’re not disappointed each and every week. These milestones give you a chance to reevaluate your progress and change your approach if you need to.

There’s also another one that’s interesting: recurring timeframes. These are usually what you think of when you’re building habits or other recurring things you want to do. I want to walk for 30 minutes every day. I want to call one friend at least once a week. These are things where you’re trying to develop a new habit in your life.

Recurring timeframes don’t necessarily have an end point, but they establish a rhythm in your life, and they’re really important for that. Personally, one of the ones I have is to exercise every day, and also to go out and walk at least a few times a week with my dog.

Doing it once is great, but that’s not the end. It’s not a fixed goal. It’s not like, Well, I walked—done for the rest of my life. No, I did it this week, and that same set of goals, same timeframe, comes up again next week. Recurring timeframes are really good for developing habits.

There are different types of timeframes, so you want to choose the one that matches the nature of your goal. A one-time project—something like I want to clean the room—has a completion deadline. There may be milestones if it’s a bigger project, but for smaller projects, it’s just a deadline. When you hit that deadline, hopefully you’re done with what you wanted to do.

But a habit-changing goal, like we just talked about, probably needs a recurring timeframe. A major life transition might need both—some specific deadlines for initial changes or milestones you want to hit, and then a recurring timeframe for maintaining that new lifestyle.

So, mix and match as appropriate. But the real, underlying point here is that when you're setting time-based goals, be realistic about how long things actually take. Think about whether the type of timeframe you’re choosing actually makes sense for the goal you’re working on. 

That realistic part is really important. We humans tend to be overly optimistic about what we can accomplish in any time period. Allow yourself some grace. If something takes longer than you planned, learn from it and just reschedule the remaining part of the task as a new task—clean the other half of the room, take the other half of my walk, whatever it is.

It’s not a failure—it’s just a learning process. There’s actually a name for this tendency. It’s called the planning fallacy. Humans have a real bias to underestimate how long a task will take—which is no surprise, but it’s true.

Even when we’ve already had experience with similar tasks taking longer than expected, we always kind of think, Well, next time I do it, I’ve learned from the last time. It’ll go faster. And so we just tend to be a little too optimistic in our planning. That’s why we’re so often late on things.

In professional project planning, there are a lot of techniques for mitigating that. But a really simple one that helps a lot is to apply a multiplier. I’ll take a best-case or, more accurately, an expected-case timeframe, and a worst-case timeframe, and kind of weigh those two things.

Then I’ll multiply that time by something—maybe 1.1, or 1.5, or even 2 if it’s a bigger project—depending on the task. If I think something will take two weeks, maybe I give myself three or four weeks. Because I know there’s going to be setup time I didn’t allow for, or I’ll need materials—I'll have to go to the store to get something. This buffer allows for unexpected complications and the things you overlooked in the first plan. It makes it more likely that your planning will be successful, so you won’t tend to have those negative thoughts about failing to meet your deadlines.

That’s really important—because deadlines really are there to serve you, not to stress you unnecessarily. They’re tools to help you achieve what matters—not something to beat yourself up with. If things don’t go quite as expected, look back on it. Maybe you should’ve broken it down into smaller steps.

When you break something down, you can estimate each smaller step, and that gives you more accurate results. Maybe you should’ve restructured the task, or chosen a different kind of deadline. But the big thing is—meeting the deadline isn’t the deciding factor. What matters is making progress on your goal. So deadlines are just a tool. They’re there to serve you and help you—not to make you feel worse.

That’s the high-level part of time-based goals. These time-based goals are particularly helpful when it comes to the big dreams that we have. Many of us have deferred things throughout life for various reasons—thinking either, later, or when the kids are older, when they’re in college, when we’re retired, or whatever that next step is you thought was coming. Maybe you were busy with your family or focused on your career.

Well, now might be the perfect time to go back and revisit those dreams you didn’t get a chance to do earlier—when you said, I’ll do them someday. Well, now is the someday when you can do it. Adding timeframes makes those dreams much more likely to become a reality.

So a quick recap and some practical tips. Write down your deadlines. Put them somewhere visible. That’s really important because you want to remind yourself of them. Put it on a calendar, set reminders, create a visual tracker—whatever works for you to keep the timeframe of what you want to do, when you want to get something finished, front and center.

Keep reminding yourself—Wow, it’s almost the end of April, and I thought I was going to do that by May. Maybe I can fit in a couple of hours on it now. If it’s hidden away, you won’t think about it until it’s already May, and then, Oh man, I said I was going to do that by May. See, I can’t do anything.

You want to help yourself succeed, so keep those reminders visible. Be specific about the when. Vague timeframes like soon just aren’t motivating. But by April 30th—that’s much more effective. The more specific your timeframe, the more specific your goal date, the easier it is to plan and hold yourself accountable.

Then, like we talked about earlier, consider sharing your deadline or your timeframe with someone else—especially someone supportive. External accountability can be a powerful motivator. Choose someone who will encourage you and help you in your progress. I know a lot of us have friends who will tease us, Ah, still didn’t make any progress, huh? But you really want somebody who’s helping you along—like, Hey, do you want me to call you during the week? Check in, see how you’re doing? Or just help you stay motivated.

There’s a friend of mine and we have weekly calls. We talk to each other about how things are going. We’re both very supportive of one another, and it’s a huge motivator. I know I have this call coming up on Wednesday nights, and I don’t want to disappoint him. He doesn’t want to disappoint me. But we also know we’re both supportive.

So if no progress was made, it’s not like, Huh… didn’t make any progress again? It’s been three weeks now. What’s going on? It’s more like, Hey, how come nothing’s happened? Is it not important to you? Or is something else going on in your life that’s taken priority? It’s not a failure—it’s a problem-solving opportunity. Having someone external you can share your goals and timeframes with helps a lot.

Another very important thing is to celebrate when you meet your deadlines. Celebrate when you complete something. Acknowledging your successes, even the small ones, reinforces the positive behavior and makes you more likely to set and achieve time-based goals in the future.

Let's recap about time-based goals. They create urgency and motivation. They help with planning, accountability, and prioritization. Effective time-based goals can be completion deadlines, progress milestones, or recurring timeframes.

It all depends on what works best for your specific goal—and be really realistic about your timeframes. Adjusting—when you need to—is part of it. Things happen in life. But still maintain a commitment to your goals. When you combine the time-based element with the other components we’ve discussed—making your goal specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant—you truly do have a SMART and powerful framework for achieving your dreams and turning them into reality.

Next week, we’re going to do a comprehensive review of the entire SMART framework. I’m going to jam it all into one session—it might be a little bit longer—bringing all these pieces together. We’ll also talk about how they work as an integrated system. And I’ll be sharing some information: we’re going to have an upcoming free webinar where we’ll dive into this a little deeper. We’re going to try to have some worksheets and other resources you can use to apply these concepts to your own life.

Your homework for this week is to take the goal you’ve been working with. If you’ve been following along, you’re probably working on one or maybe the same couple of goals. Make sure it has a clear and realistic timeframe.

Then ask yourself: When exactly do I want to accomplish this by? What milestones or checkpoints might help me stay on track? Is this timeframe realistic given my other commitments? How will I remind myself of the deadline and hold myself accountable? If your goal doesn’t already have a timeframe, add one. And if it does, evaluate whether that timeframe is really serving you well—or if it needs adjustment.

Extra points if you think about how you’ll hold yourself accountable—because holding yourself accountable is, again, something to help you. People tend to say, Well, if I don’t make it, then I won’t eat any candy, or I won’t do something fun. But it’s not supposed to be something negative.

It’s supposed to be something that, if you attain it, you do something positive. The accountability isn’t meant to be punishment. Negative motivation doesn’t work very well long-term. Which brings us to the last part: if you do make a goal, you have to remember to actually ask—how are you going to reward yourself?

Not if, but when you succeed.

So that’s it for the evening. Please remember, as always, there’s a lot of strife and wars in the world. There’s social unrest throughout the world in a lot of different areas. Please check out our updated page at UKR7.com. There are links to help in Ukraine. They could use a lot of help right now.

If Ukraine isn’t an area that’s top of mind for you right now, we also recommend World Central Kitchen—WCK.org. They work anywhere disasters happen. They do super important work—they bring food and basic services into affected areas, like when a hurricane comes through or some other disaster strikes. Great organization—check them out at WCK.org.

As we always say, there are a lot of organizations—not only national and international agencies—but a lot of local groups that help people in your own community as well. If you want to work with one of those organizations, that’s great too. 

But you don’t necessarily have to give money. Maybe you’re just not in a situation right now, or not in the mindset to donate. That’s okay. There are places you can volunteer. Or just make little changes in your daily life. When you come across somebody who just doesn’t look happy—or even if they do look happy—say Good morning, or How you doing? Or just smile. It can be super simple. Just acknowledging that the other person exists can change their whole outlook on the day in a very positive way.

Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. It takes your focus off your own problems and turns it outward—toward the rest of the world. You start to recognize that other people have problems too, and by simply acknowledging them, and acknowledging their struggles, you might help make their day a whole lot better.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe and hit that like button. And if not, drop me a comment—let me know what you’d like to hear.

Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you've dreamed of, because that’s the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.