Writing down both short-term and long-term goals is important to accomplish both.

• To achieve long-term goals

  The main goal of penning down your short-term goals on a piece of paper is to achieve your long-term goals.

  Accomplishing multiple smaller goals will over time lead to achieving your larger, longer-term goals because your small achievements will start to compound into much larger accomplishments.

• To track your progress

  To track our progress, it’s essential to formulate what it is exactly that we want to achieve.

  That’s why writing down our short-term goals is critical to be capable of reaching our end goal(s). Because it sets a simple, measurable standard for what we want and need to attain.

• To reward yourself for your short-term achievements

  

  It’s hard to reward and congratulate yourself if you don’t even know what you’re aiming to accomplish.

  Short-term achievements make for objective, concrete accomplishments. Once achieved, people can then reward themselves to keep motivated to put in the work. Who doesn’t like to get rewarded from time to time?

• To know what you want to achieve in the short and long term

  Successes are rarely accomplished randomly. Even though, luck can play an important part as well.

  People often start with good intentions and motivations but over time, lose clarity and focus of what they set out to accomplish in the first place, leading them to run in circles, essentially getting nowhere.

  Having penned down short and long-term goals can help to prevent one from losing their vision and will aid in keeping a clear focus.

• Preventing or minimizing procrastination

  

  Procrastination means the act of delaying or, potentially, putting off things indefinitely.

  Procrastinating frequently leads to negative thinking and feeling guilty about the things they’ve been delaying because they know they should take action and finish those tasks.

  Delaying tasks is a lot harder when being constantly reminded what one needs to do to reach their goals. That’s why writing down your desires makes you less likely to procrastinate.

• To serve as motivation when times get tough

  

  Motivation is needed to get going, but a good, purposeful routine is necessary to finish a task. Especially when motivation starts to dwindle.

  That’s why most of us can use that little extra bit of motivation from time to time. Particularly when times get tough.

  Having written down goals can help motivate people to get things done and realize how far they’ve come already. We need to learn to appreciate the journey, not just the destination.

• To put in extra effort

  Written down goals can create an extra sense of concern and thus, urgency. A sense of concern and urgency is necessary for people to undertake action.

  When there is no sense of hurry or worry, people often have no incentive to start working on their goals. Why would you do something hard when feeling like you have all the time in the world?

  Having a written list of things to do helps to create a sense of urgency, reminding you what you set out to do in the first place, while keeping you honest if you’ve been putting in the required work or not.

• To get a clear picture of the end goal

  

  Short-term goals provide an answer to the question: “What is it exactly that I’m seeking to accomplish?”

  Reaching your end goal in the future is impossible if you don’t know what you want to accomplish. So before starting on the journey, it’s important to get a clear picture of what exactly we’re setting out to do.

• To formulate a plan

  Short-term goals are essentially the plan we need to follow and succeed at to reach our longer-term accomplishments.

  Reaching multiple accomplishments in the short term sets us up to acquire the necessary skills we need to become successful in our future endeavors.

• To make purposeful, helpful changes to our plan

  Making random changes to a plan is a sure way towards failure.

  To make purposeful and helpful changes, one must have carefully formulated short-term and long-term goals. When problems then start to arise, we can methodically analyze and change the suboptimal goals and approaches in our plan.

• Building self-confidence

  

  Self-confidence is a curious thing.

  Self-confidence is derived from how capable and aware we are of our ability to successfully perform tasks.

  Having written down our desired goals and tracking the ones we’ve already accomplished can lead to improving our self-confidence due to improved visibility and awareness of our abilities.

• Can build momentum

  Reaching the short-term achievements you’ve set out to do will give you a boost of motivation, excitement, and confidence for the things yet to come.

  This means that achievements can propel you to further and even larger successes in the future.

• People who write down short-term goals are more likely to achieve them

  

  People who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them than people who don’t.

  I guess the most important reason for this is that written goals are clearly formulated, tangible, and always present.

  When not written down, what we seek to accomplish is less clear, less present, and more likely to subside in the background. Especially when living busy and/or stressful lives.

• Peace of mind

  Not having to worry about forgetting what we set out to do or being afraid of losing focus on the big picture can give people a certain peace of mind.

  Even more, it makes it extraordinarily easy to track progress, which can be used as an objective way to measure progress. “Have I accomplished this short-term goal or not?”