I’ve been writing and thinking about the theme of goal setting in a series of four posts. In the first post, I looked at finding and achieving appropriate goals: Step 1: Needing Goals? Having difficulty following through? Set better goals: step 1 of four.

Then in Step 2: Consider your current goals and timescale, then I examined our current goals, and the time horizon. In Step 3: Set your new goals and timescale, we looked at how to set new goals.

The last post in this mini-series outlines a vital step in the process: Evaluating your goals and refining them. This vital step is what will separate the successful outcome from the ‘failure’. In reality, failure to achieve your goals in step 3 often leads to frustration, and broken goals, not to mention dreams.

Let me give you a good example: You have been putting on a little extra body weight (a spare tyre). Or as a friend once put it, the clothes in your wardrobe keep shrinking. You resolve to do something about it. So you draw up an ambitious plan to cut your weight by exercising, eating well, and dieting. After ten days, you’re fed up. You’ve lost no weight, you feel hungry all the time, and you’re fed up of carrots and carrot juice. Most reasonable people would conclude that the whole process is a disaster, and resign themselves to having an extra tyre for emergencies. In fact, could it be that the problem is that the process ended with the failure? Could it be that the goals needed refining to produce some traction? Could it be that achieving your plan is actually a recursive process.

And so it is. Recursive, that is. Goals need to be refined as the data pours in about performance. Perhaps, in the case above, the person isn’t exercising effectively, or perhaps s/he is consuming too many cokes after exercising thereby negating the postives of weight reduction. Taking a few minutes to review what has really been going on could lead to an insight that improves the situation, and leads you to success.

So, once you’re into your plan, it’s a good idea to sit down and evaluate your successes (as well as your failures), and outline tweaks that can capitalize on your strengths, while downplaying your failures. The most effective way to fail is to completely ignore any of your successes, while overdoing your lack of progress. To avoid this, you need to set up your mindset to succeed. After all, success is one or two steps away from a good plan. And a good plan often starts out as just a plan!

I’ve been blogging on almost daily basis for nearly a year now, and there have been times when I had some good posts that just weren’t ready, some good ideas that were still gestating, and I was stuck.  This must happen to all bloggers at times: so I have created a list of types of posts that you can add when you’re next post is still not finished.

1. Find a clip on YouTube or one of the other video sites that is somehow relevant. Add some of your own comments!

2. Find a quotation that you like and that is appropriate to your blog. I’ve used this on some occasions.

3. You can post a photograph or two that you took recently, to inspire or entertain your readers!

4.  Post a question for discussion, esp. a controversial one, and elicit a chain of responses.

5.  Write a 50 word post on one of the following: a plugin you use, a news story you just read, or something similar.

I hope this little post inspires you all!

Engadget is a site that I visit on and off for a quick ‘taste’ of the latest tech news. And to that end, it suffices for that. But I refuse to visit that site on a regular basis for one simple reason.

Let’s take a typical story on Engadget (no links to them from here! After you read this, you’ll understand). This story is about Cybook Gen3 e-book reader.

I read the story on the first page, and was looking for a link to the website (didn’t think to check the image!) so I checked the other links in the article: 2 were for links to other pages on Engadget, and one was for the reader who submitted the article.

So I clicked on the most likely one. That took me to another page with two links on it, each of them was for more pages in Engadget. In other words, I got further and further away from what I was looking for and that was a link to Cybook.

In frustration, I write clicked after highlighting the term, then selected Google search. Boom I was there quickly. So I found the answer to my search, but not the answer to a more basic question: Why does Engagdet make linking to other sites less than obvious?

Engagdet does not include links to websites in the body of the story at all. Links to other sites are either image links, or after the end of the story.

This is most definitely one of my pet hates, and something that Google didn’t intend. I wonder why Engadget does this. Any suggestions? It’s definitely not reader friendly.