Now that I am busy with the end of financial year rush of work, I have had to take stock of exactly what I have achieved so far this year.

Having set myself some pretty lofty goals at the beginning of the year, the rewards were on par. If I hadn’t given myself a set of rewards of things I either really want (or want to have an excuse to buy) I doubt I would have maintained my drive to try and complete these goals. You can get stuffed if you try and tell me it is all about the journey and not the final prize! As humans we need a reason to strive for something, wether it is being in competition with someone, a glittering prize or the adoration of our peers (who hasn’t wished for that!).

Just to give you a sample of the rewards and goals so far, better house, holiday in the sun, holiday in the sun during winter, new laptop, complete a full website redesign, gain five hundred followers in twitter, get to the first page in search results, complete the first draft of my ebook on graphic design and going through all my old work samples and backing them up.

There are many more rewards and goals that I have on a list to refer to. Some are really long term, like complete my Masters in Graphic Design, and others are more monetary based, like complete my ebook and start selling it.

I have keyed some rewards to help stave off burning myself out, like once the ebook is done and up for sale and is actually making sales, I am going to take a short holiday with the family. And at no time am I allowing myself to be doing any work!

What sort of goals and rewards do you set yourself?

Even if it is a case of ‘Complete the book layout for the index section and I am rewarding myself with a cup of coffee and two tim tam biscuits’ good ideas for goals and rewards can help us all stay motivated longer.

These days you are only a quick internet search away from comparison sites that review pretty much anything from apps to zoos. Knowing more about the products or services on offer helps you make an informed decision before you buy. When talking about an investment for your business in phones, webhosting or even software you could spend a lot of time doing research on pricing and the product reviews before making a purchase. Sites like iselect give you a great starting point or if you are after the best web hosting service there are sites for that too.

The other thing to keep in mind is the changing quality of service you receive. When I first decided on a hosting company, it had excellent reviews and a strong set of reviews for the people behind it. Six years on, and they have changed from what they used to include for free and have made them paid extras. Whilst this is not a big thing, coupled with the ever decreasing level of service and the ongoing issues with uptime of their servers, I am looking at switching out to another provider before the end of the year when my renewal comes up. Now there are plenty of places giving great sign up deals, but I have been noticing a lot of them get quite a bit of the ‘money making – get rich quick’ style of websites. I definitely want to steer clear of them so as not to be tarred with the same brush by simply being on an ip address that is almost the same as one that is churning out tonnes of spam like advertising and pushing dubious business practices.

Being informed is really only just a few web searches, and even if we use one of the impartial review sites as a basis it is better than getting something that turns out to be a cheap second rate product that we could of saved time and money in the long run.

If you have any good review sites that show
consumer rankings that you use, please add them in the comments section for the other readers to use as well.

I want to know, what the hell toadflax is!