How to Make Your 90-Day Blitz a Success

Did you know that 90 days—or 45, or even 30—can make a lifetime of difference?

Planning such a blitz at important points in your life can allow you to organize and get the most out of a compressed time frame—such as starting a new role within a company as described in this Forbes article. 

Are you familiar with the idea of a 90-Day Blitz? Have you ever tried one?

The first thing is to know this is a tool you can use to recharge your life in areas where you are becoming bored or losing interest. 

What Is It?

A blitz is a period of intense, focused effort designed to compress time frames and accelerate progress toward a goal.

Picture it as a race, a ten-minute sprint, like the first stage at the beginning of a marathon to help you get started, and get up to full speed as quickly and smoothly as possible.

If you’re just getting started on a new goal or if you’re feeling stuck and not making much progress, it’s time for a blitz in your life.

How Does It Work?

First, you set a long-range target—something specific that excites you and means a lot as you move forward in life.

Sure, you’ve accomplished a lot of things in your life but we all have things we still would like to do.

Things that would be fun. Things that would be exciting. Things that would open up new doors.

What is that for you?

This blitz is your chance to decide what’s next for you—that lights the fire of hope inside of you, and everything great starts with hope!

Next, you set a short-range target—a point you want to get to in 90 days that represents big progress toward your long-range goal.

This is where most people fall apart! They try to attack the whole 90 days at once.

That’s like trying to run a marathon all at once.

The one thing marathoners will tell you is you don’t think about running 26 miles when the gun sounds at the marathon.

Before you start a blitz, you need to have a plan.

You have blocked the race out into stages and the only thing you focus on is getting going, and getting a rhythm so you can complete the first stage on time. Like the Bible says, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Your job is to get to the first stage and you can worry about the rest after you get that done. Figure out what activity you need to focus on to make that 90-day goal happen as fast and efficiently as possible.

The most important thing for you to do to be successful in this project is to make sure that the most important things get done.

We all have limited time and energy, and we all get easily distracted. For you to be successful, you’ve got to know what the most productive activity is for you to focus on and eliminate all of the other clutter.

To be successful, you have to identify the most productive activity for you to focus on and eliminate all of the other clutter. Click To Tweet

Once you’ve identified the most important activity, that activity then moves up to become your top priority for the duration of the Blitz.

Think quality and quantity, not or. Devote as much time as possible to quality activity, the most important things to make fast progress.

As I described in Serial Winner, you’ve got to overdo to give yourself the greatest odds of success—to blow past surprises, delays, or hurdles that crop up.

Break your first target down into bite-size chunks.

For example, if you have only a thirty-day goal, you’re allowing yourself just one chance to get it right. If you have daily and weekly goals, you give yourself 30 chances to get it right.

You can have a bad day, you can get behind schedule, and still not panic because you know how many days you have left to catch up and get ahead of the game.

It makes you stronger and gives you mental toughness.

It takes the guesswork out of what you should be doing right now and gives you confidence that all you need to be doing at any given moment is what you’ve assigned yourself for that day.

It’s like money. If you take care of the nickels and dimes, the dollars will take care of themselves.

What About Life Balance?

You’ve got the rest of the year to worry about balance. For the next 90 days, you’re going to move forward in leaps and bounds on one of your biggest priorities. That’s the point.

Lots of people love this idea!

They get started on their blitz full of enthusiasm. Then 2 weeks in, they quit. Let me offer some tips for making a blitz work for you.

Prepare the people in your life.

Explain to family, friends, and colleagues what you’re trying to do.

You’re on a mission for the next 30 to 90 days. Tell them that you would appreciate their support, and as few distractions as possible.

Winners know that even they can get pulled away from their priorities if they aren’t careful. By getting people around you on board, you’ll minimize the potential for distraction.

Clear the Decks

If you head into a blitz with a load of other responsibilities or commitments, big or small, hanging over you, you’ll never sustain your focus.

Take a few days or even a week to knock out every small thing you need to get to, or that you told somebody you’d do. Those are just distractions waiting to leap out when you’re getting tired, or your focus is wavering.

Block Your Time

Very, very few people can dive into a hole and just work on one thing for weeks on end, shutting everything else out. We’ve got families, other work responsibilities and so on.

To maintain without being pulled off course, block your time.

Mark time on your calendar every week for tackling other responsibilities, or every day if necessary.

Don’t let yourself be distracted by those things outside of that time. Make the first and last 30 minutes of each day your email catch-up time. 

Figure out what you need to do to leave as much of your time as possible open for your blitz of activity!

Plan to go faster!

One of the biggest keys to success is speed. The faster you can go, the more likely it is you’ll get it done. Think about distractions and problems like bombs to your plan—it’ll be hard for them to hit a fast-moving target.

One of the biggest keys to success is speed. It's hard for distractions to hit a fast-moving target. Click To Tweet

Set your target for your blitz and then plan how to hit it even faster. If you’ve got 90 days before you really need to hit a goal, plan to get it done in 45. That gives you a 100% margin of error!

Race to your goal as fast as you can.

Plan a Victory Celebration

Give yourself something to look forward to after weeks of grinding effort. Plan something you’ll really enjoy. Even better, make it a group event and send out the invitations now—give yourself the gift of positive social pressure.

Winners achieve their goals by going into blitz mode when they need to. How will you use this technique to build huge momentum to carry you toward your long-term goals faster?