Why three words?

Last year I made a conscientious effort to unsubscribe from newsletters and blog notices that I was not reading. I found myself deleting tons of email notifications without reading the emails. So I spent a good portion of a morning unsubscribing which has made my email much easier to manage. One of the few subscriptions I kept was Chris Brogan’s Sunday newsletter.  This Sunday’s message was a follow up to his January 1 blog post – My Three Words for 2015 .  Chris recommends picking three words to live by for the year as opposed to having New Year’s resolutions. I first saw this idea last year. In his Sunday message, he followed up on his caution on using the word focus. As I recall, I am pretty sure that I used focus last year. I also don’t remember other two words I picked, as I did not write them down anywhere I could find them.  So this year, I am documenting my 3 words:  Goals, Commit, Do.

Which leads me to why three words?  In my case, one will not be enough. Goals — setting goals, planning for goals, knowing goals — goals are good to have. But just having goals is not enough.  To begin with, goals need to be carefully chosen. Are they good goals? Are they worth having? What kind of goals are they – lifetime, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily?

The second word helps with that. Commit.  I need to commit to these goals – to care enough about them to set about trying to attain them. I know from past experience that in order to commit to goals, I need to limit the number of goals, to choose them carefully and to pick goals that are achievable, not easy to achieve but achievable.

And the third word is important to actually achieve the goals that I commit to.  Do.  I thought about using Implement as my third word, but do seems more direct. For me, do means that I do what I need to do to achieve the goals that I am committed to achieve when I need to do them.  This does require a bit of planning — but not so much planning that it interferes with the doing!  What works for me is to take each goal I am committed to and to identify on a monthly basis, which goals need to be worked on and the time I need to spend working on them.  This allows me to identify the specific tasks I need to accomplish each week. Although I sometimes plan to do a task on a specific day, I more often just work on doing the some of the tasks every day.

So for 2015, the three words that I plan to live by are Goals, Commit, Do.  Do you have three words? I’d love to hear yours.