You have big ambitions that fill you with excitement. You want to accomplish them and maybe, you even believe that you can. The only problem is that they’re so big that you struggle to know where to start. You need to break down your long term goals, and these examples of short term goals will show you how.

Here are a few short-term goals examples to help you get started:

• Go on 12 dates in the next 12 weeks
• Meet 25 people in the next 30 days
• Pick the college I want to go to by the end of the semester
• Spend one hour a day for the next 90 days finding and working on my passions

I’ll get into these and the eight others I’ve got for you right after we talk about what short-term goals are.

How Short Term Goals Help You Reach Big Ambitions

You know that a goal is a short term one if it includes specific results that you work toward on a monthly or quarterly timeline that contributes to your long-term goals. In other words, short term goals are one step in the breakdown of bigger goals. 

The only way to reach your long-term ambitions is by breaking them down into smaller pieces. To solve an engineering problem, I have to take it apart and find the individual problems I need to solve to get to the whole solution. Goals are the same way, with short-term goals being one step in the process.

Think of goal-setting on different levels, or time periods like this:

• You begin with a big goal on a yearly or longer timeline
• Yearly goals you can divide into quarterly or monthly goals
• Quarterly goals get broken down into weekly milestones
• Weekly milestones then turn into daily action steps

To break them down, you follow this pattern:

Yearly or Long-Term → Quarterly or Short-Term → Weekly → Daily

Then you work these backward to make a plan to make your big ambitions happen. The small steps of daily actions make up the weekly results, which combine to form the short-term ones, which lead to you accomplishing your long-term goals.

Relationships

1. Go on 12 dates in the next 12 weeks

2. Meet 25 new people in the next 30 days

3. Become closer to my son this quarter

4. In the next two months, develop the habit of going on a date with my spouse once a week

Financial

5. Build a website and write 25 posts in the next three months

6. Read three books in the next six weeks that will inspire me to improve my financial freedom

7. Pick the college I want to go to by the end of the semester

8. Spend one hour a day for the next 90 days finding and working on my passions

Fitness

9. Run a 5k two months from now

10. Lose 12 pounds in the next 12 weeks

11. Get body fat down 1.5% this quarter

12. Get on medication for anxiety 

What to Do After Reading These Short Term Goals Examples

Now that you have some starting points for your short term goals, it’s time to break down your bigger goals into smaller steps. 

Accomplishing a big goal is like climbing a mountain. Thinking about how far it is to the top will overwhelm you and can even keep you from starting. 

But if you only think about hiking the next mile, it’s not so bad. You can easily think of taking just one step at a time until you’ve walked a mile. But when you’re focusing on the top of the mountain it’s a lot more difficult to imagine getting there. Which makes taking the next step much harder.

Short term goals let you take the big mountains of your goals and break them into manageable milestones. You can actually imagine accomplishing some of these examples of short term goals. If you can break down your big ambitions into similar chunks, you’ll be far more likely to make them actually happen. 

Just put one step in front of the other, look ahead to your short-term goals, and before you know it you’ll be standing on top of the mountain!