Every Wednesday is Tip Day. This Wednesday: Tips for reaching a goal. When I was procrastinating about launching this blog, I found some suggestions that helped me get it done. If you’re having trouble accomplishing a task, try these tips:

• Write down your goal.
•  Make a long to-do list to give yourself a feeling of progress as you work toward a distant goal.
•   Break your main task into smaller, more manageable tasks, and begin by doing whatever is easiest. If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be suprised to find how little remains that we cannot do. Samuel Butler.
•   Set a deadline.
•  Don’t give up if something interferes with your deadline.
•  Ask advice and support from knowledgeable people.
•   Get familiar with other people’s work, so you don’t reinvent the wheel.
• Sometimes it helps to keep the stakes low at the beginning, so you feel less worried about making a mistake; sometimes it helps to keep the stakes high from the beginning, so you’re not tempted to slack off.
•   Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s better to do something imperfectly than nothing perfectly.

Always think of what you have to do as easy and it will become so. –Émile Coué.

From 2006 through 2014, as she wrote The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, Gretchen chronicled her thoughts, observations, and discoveries on The Happiness Project Blog.