I write often about accomplishing your tasks, projects, and goals, and I’ve discussed some specifics about setting goals several times, including here.
This time around, I’d like to suggest some additional ideas about setting meaningful, helpful, and fruitful goals.
Let’s start with this one:
Consider Timeframes
A lot of people will tell you that the most helpful goals contain deadlines. Without a target date for completion, it’s easy to let your goals slide – perhaps indefinitely.
But far fewer people will encourage you to be mindful of short-, mid-, and long-range timeframes and to establish a portfolio of goals with varied deadlines.
The advantages of this approach include:
- Short-range goals – perhaps requiring only a week to three months – tend to be less ambitious, easier to achieve, and often more clear-cut because they’re tied so directly to your current situation and immediate interests.
- Mid-range goals – perhaps intended for completion in three months to one year – can encompass larger, more ambitious achievements that offer more significant benefits.
- Long-range goals – perhaps requiring two, three, or more years of effort – can be true game-changers in your work and your life, potentially bringing you a higher level of ability and success, a stronger career or personal position, or even an entirely different situation.
It’s good to maintain a steady diet of goals in such different timeframes. When you accomplish one, set another, and gradually work toward each of them as part of your regular schedule.
Consider Both Work and Life Goals
It’s beneficial to balance the demands and satisfactions of your work against those of your personal life. Committing too heavily to any one of them saps your strength and eats away at your level of motivation.
A good balance, however, is often difficult to achieve because the demands and satisfactions of your work are more often clearly delineated and externally evaluated. They can easily exert a stronger pull on your time and attention.
That’s why it’s important to make a conscious effort to achieve and maintain a balance that meets all your practical, psychological, and emotional needs. One way to do this more easily and accurately is by keeping a journal. You can log not just the amount of time you spend on the various elements of your work and your life, but also on your achievements and satisfactions within each sphere of activity.
This balance need not be 50/50, of course. But it should be a balance that comports with your own values, preferences, and desires. Above all, it should feel right.
Consider the Larger Picture
It’s all too easy to set your goals on the basis of practical matters of implementation and even direction. How do we afford that home? What’s the next milestone to reach for in my career? Where can I get the help I need to make my numbers or improve my performance?
But goals – particularly long-range goals – can be set to accomplish transformational change, too. Can I steer toward a more advantageous career direction? What skills and abilities can I cultivate to generate a more meaningful future? How can I strengthen my relationships with people who will help me discover and develop my true nature? What changes will help me make better use of my strengths and passions?
In years past, when I offered expertise on time-management issues, one of the maxims I tried to instill – and still believe – was a Big Picture priority, along the lines of: “Of course it’s worthwhile to do things right, but it’s even better to do the right things.”
Consider a Restricted Focus
There’s a lot of advice bandied about regarding goal-setting, including the suggestion that you should live a goal-oriented life with specific targets for much – if not all – of what you do in both your work and your life.
However, trying to achieve too many goals at once can dilute your energy and effort for any one of them, and can even create conflicts that hamper your progress toward overall productivity and success.
My suggestion, therefore, is to work toward only a few goals at a time.
It’s OK to create and maintain a long list of goals, of course. But most of these should stay on the back-burner, absorbing your time and energy only at rare moments when conditions create something like a “perfect storm” of positive opportunity: when immediate exploitation is easy, and immediate progress is likely.
The rest of the time, it’s fruitful to restrict your efforts to a handful of targets, perhaps two each of short-, mid-, and long-range goals. These are few enough that you can always keep them in mind and on your schedule as you work through your daily obligations, finding and making opportunities to steadily push each one forward, a little at a time, until completion.
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