People who set goals tend to be more successful, all things being equal. Use the following tips to help with your goal setting endeavors.
1. Recording Your Goals:
One of the most important aspects when setting your goals is to get them down on paper. If you want to record them electronically, that is perfectly acceptable. Some people, however, like to have their goals written on paper so that they can put them on their wall for easy reference. There are those who can make a mental note of their goals but consider not doing this. It’s too easy to forget or to change them midstream.
2. What Do You Want to Accomplish?:
Setting goals requires knowing what you want to accomplish. If could be something personal, something for business, or both. It could be goals for other people, like your kids or another family member. Your goals should be high-level items, such as getting a promotion, or saving for college, etc.
3. Determine the Action Steps Needed to Accomplish Your Goals:
For each goal, identify the action steps needed to accomplish those goals. Action items are much more granular than goals. An example of an action item would be to put aside $50 per week which helps accomplish your saving for college goal. You may find that you have several action items per goal or not that many. It depends on the goal.
4. Create Critical Paths for Goals and Actions:
Some goals are going to rely on the completion of previous goals before being able to start them. The same applies to action items. On your written action plan, you could write a connecting line from one step to the dependent step with an arrow to indicate the relationship.
5. Come Up with Alternative Action Steps As You Approach Milestones:
Not every step is going to work out exactly as planned. Therefore, you want to find alternative action items. If these alternate steps start to get overly complicated, decide if the alternates are needed and discard if not.
6. Commit to Time Frames:
It’s great to have goals, but if there are no time frames associated with those goals, you have a greater chance of not getting them accomplished. If your boss had you set up goals, you probably already have associated time frames for them. If you are trying to achieve goals for yourself or your own business, set dates for each. Ideally set your goals out 90 days in the future.
7. Get Others to Help:
When you set dates, and you find difficulty in getting some action items completed, have others do it for you. You could hire people, or you can consider outsourcing. The downside to doing this is you will now have to wear your project manager hat. If you hire the wrong people, you will spend more time than necessary managing them. You will defeat the advantages of getting help. However, if you find the right people, they will get you to your goals much quicker than doing it on your own. You can do this for all your action steps or a select few.
ACTIONABLE STEPS
- List 10 goals that you have always wanted to accomplish. At this stage, don’t constrain yourself with budgets or time. Act as if you have unlimited of both.
- Prioritize the list created in the first item. You could list them in order of importance with the most important appearing first. Another method is to build a rating system.
- Create action items for each of your goals. If it makes sense to add alternatives, go ahead and add those as well. You don’t need to prioritize your action items as these are all necessary to accomplish your goals. Commit to dates that you will get the goals/action items completed.