The purpose and intent of using a basic system of journaling is to create written goals and action plans that take you and your home inspection business to where it is you ultimately want to go. Think of where you want to be at the end of your career and work backwards. What does your retirement look and feel like.

I'm not going to bore you with all the details of why journaling works so well. I'm not going to show you the statistics of all the successful people that journal, what's the point, you wouldn't believe me. Yeah, the number is that large.

Flying by the seat of your pants is just a crash landing in progress. -- Bob Kille

One of the most important aspects of goal creation is that you must know where you want to go. For instance, what's your exit strategy? Where and when will you retire and what type of financial arrangements will be in place when you get there. What type of lifestyle is it that your after? What is it that you want to be remembered for?

Here's the basic premise, we have goals - the end game - and we need an action plan to get there. By using the suggested daily, weekly and monthly journals you're going to record your progress implementing the reverse engineered plan.

It works like this:

• Decide on what the future after home inspection looks and feels like. Decide on how much money it would take to actually live that life. Now decide on what its going to take to get there and start writing it down in your five or ten year plan. Be specific an what needs to be accomplished in the years ahead to get where your going.

• Write out your goals for the first year (One Year Plan) and what it would take to accomplish them.

• Next, break up that year into twelve segments (Monthly Plans).

• Each month is then broken down into four weeks of action tasks designed to get the months objectives finished. You should have a weekly journal as an overview of where you stand at weeks end according to your action plan.
• Your daily journal can be a combination of a To Do List and a diary. Writing out where you failed or succeeded each day helps keep the momentum going.

Well, not to belay the point but it's critical to write this stuff out so that your subconscious mind can get to work. Again, if you don't know where your going, you'll end up somewhere else. We'll talk more about long term goals later.

To trim all this down to something that we can actually manage being the beginners that we are - were going to use our marketing plan and communication skills to get us to the promise land. With sales, all things are possible.

• Were not after a novel when were journaling, just a recording of what went down that day, what you accomplished in your weekly tasks and any new business that should be noted. I like to include a short segment on health, family, home and friends.

• By viewing and contemplating your goals, and obstacles to them every day, you become aware of the time that slips away without moving closer to your goals.

A weekly journal is more like a summary of how your week unfolded and your thoughts on what went wrong as well as what went right. This is the time when you reflect on your monthly goals and make any adjustments to the next weeks goals and the daily tasks that are going to get you there.

Speaking of tasks, you should try to have no more than four must accomplish weekly tasks in one day. So much of what we do on a daily basis is crisis management. Doing the things that are cast in our way without regard to our plan. But the weekly plan should consist mostly of planed tasks. Tasks that get us closer to the monthly goals and believe it or not, four tasks a day toward your weekly goals is more than most can achieve. Myself, I have a hard time doing just one.

Don't try to to setup and execute the best journaling system ever devised, but merely get started so that you can see the effects of goal clarification for yourself.

Good luck, and know this - if you can't even get your action plan down on paper - your chances of success are about two in ten. Not the kind of odds I'd bet my future on.