Writing down your goals is a powerful tool for achieving success in any area of your life. It helps to provide clarity, focus, accountability, motivation, and a way to track progress towards your goals.
When you write down your goals, you are taking a crucial step towards achieving them. Writing them down helps you to plan and organize your efforts more effectively, as it allows you to break down your goals into smaller, more manageable steps. Here’s what happens when you put pen to paper.
Clarity and Focus
Writing down your goals helps to clarify what you want to achieve and provide focus for your efforts. When you write down your goals, you are forced to think about them in more detail and consider how they fit into your larger life plan.
By putting your goals in writing, you can see them more clearly and get a better sense of what you need to do to make them happen – and people who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them. No matter what your goal is, how big or small, writing it down is the crucial first step to achieving it.
Increased Accountability:
Writing down your steps to goal achievement also increases accountability and activates both parts of your brain; the logical left hemisphere and the imaginative right hemisphere. Activating BOTH (versus only one) increases the importance of that goal in your brain and makes it much more likely to “stick”. By committing your plan to paper, you are more likely to stick to it and stay on track. Additionally, you can use your written plan to hold yourself accountable and stay motivated.
Better Planning and Organization:
Writing down your goals also helps you plan and organize your efforts more effectively. Once you have broken down your goals into smaller steps, you can prioritize them in order of importance. This allows you to focus on the most critical tasks first, ensuring that you are making progress towards your goals.
By outlining the steps you need to take to achieve your goals, you can create a roadmap to success. This plan of action helps you to stay organized and ensures that you are utilizing your time and resources effectively.
Improved Evaluation and Adjustment:
Writing down your goals enables you to evaluate your progress and course correct as needed. By regularly reviewing your goals, you can track your progress and identify any obstacles or challenges that may be preventing you from reaching your desired outcomes. People who set difficult goals are 34% more likely to love their job and individuals who use visuals to describe their goals are 52% even more likely to love their job!
We know it an important (if not the most important!) step in the goal setting process. It provides clarity and focus, increases accountability, improves planning and organization, and enables better evaluation and adjustment or correction.
External Storage and Encoding
So, if you want your goals to come to fruition, start by putting them in writing and make them a priority in your life. Writing things down happens on two levels: external storage and encoding. External storage is easy to explain; you’re storing the information contained in your goal in a location (e.g. a piece of paper) that is very easy to access and review at any time. You could post that paper in your office, on your refrigerator, etc. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to know you will remember something much better if you’re staring at a visual cue (aka reminder) every single day.
Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Writing improves that encoding process. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered.
The power of pen and paper cannot be underestimated when it comes to achieving your goals. Writing down your steps can help you clarify your goals, prioritize your tasks, track your progress, reduce stress, and increase accountability. So, the next time you set a goal, take the time to write down your steps and see how much easier it is to achieve your dreams.
For more information on the neuroscience behind our enthusiasm for “writing it down”, read the article link below.
