Every day, throughout the world, there are those who retire in the evening unsatisfied with their day. They have trouble falling asleep as they consider the many things that went wrong during the day or worse, preventing them from accomplishing what they set out to accomplish. They wake up in the morning feeling like they haven't rested enough, and often hit the snooze button on the alarm, robbing them of a valuable amount of time during the day.

Does this sound familiar to you?

When you wake up in the morning do you make a plan for your day? Do you have a "To Do List" waiting for you to work on? If the answer is "Yes!" to either of these, you probably won't get much done, as the odds are against you. And, yes, while you are in the majority, you may be starting your day off upside down. Most individuals never get what they want in life because they do not live their life effectively.

To be effective you must be successful in producing the desired or intended result to fulfill a specified function in fact. To live an effective life, you want to create an impressive and striking set of accomplishments that have an effective finale to the day.

Note the phrase "impressive and striking set of accomplishments", which is key to being effective.

If you start out the day with a huge goal of creating a savings of $500,000 USD, you are setting yourself up to fail. The odds of earning $500,000 USD in a single day are enormous. However, if you set a 20-year goal of attaining a savings of $500,000 USD, the odds increase substantially in your favor. However, unless you set daily goals that are necessary to reach that 20-year goal on time and stay on task, you will quickly fall behind. As an example, if you set your 20-year goal to have $500,000 USD in savings, your daily savings goal is $68 USD if you put your savings under the mattress. However, if you invest only $32.87 USD and earn 6.6% interest on your money, you will have earned $500,076.60 USD.

As you can see, saving $32.87 USD a day is much easier to reach over a longer period of time, if you invest wisely. The $32.87 USD is a "Mini-Goal" that if set and maintained will make each day more effective in reaching your goal. You will sleep easier if you end the day with $32.87 in your savings as you will have accomplished your daily goal.

The same holds true on whatever goals you set in your life. Planning ahead will always be better than leaving your goals to chance. Thus to become more effective each day, you need to set mini-goals for yourself. Before you lie down each evening, you want to congratulate yourself on a job well done, knowing that you have accomplished the goal you set out to achieve.

The idea is in knowing that the mini-goals you set for yourself will lead you to a bigger goal. The mini-goals will lead to your weekly goals which lead to your monthly goals which will lead to your yearly goals. What you do today will impact how your year goes. You only have so much time in a day. Why waste it?

When you’re setting mini-goals for yourself, set no more than five of them for the day. Once you accomplish the five goals for the day, you’re done. You can do more but to keep yourself hungry, it is recommended stopping at five to keep from burning out.

Five tasks per day might not sound like a lot but that’s 25 or 35 tasks per week. In a month you will have completed over 100 tasks towards your goals. Each task you complete gets you to the life you need and want for yourself.

If you find that some goals take longer, maybe only set three goals for a certain day. Perhaps setting one goal for yourself is better, because the goal is so big that you know you won’t have any time to complete other tasks.

The purpose of setting mini-goals is so you have a direction of where you want to go with your day otherwise you will arrive at a destination you don’t want.

When you set five mini-goals for yourself each day and accomplish them then your day will be effective.