Author: debby.hallett@gmail.com

If you want to achieve your goals, write them in a way that supports you to achieve them. Make them SMART goals.

Specific:

Make your goal specific, so that you can recognize it when you reach it. Your goals might be, “I’ll try to have a better relationship with my husband in the future”, or “I will do at least one thoughtful task for my husband per day this month”? Although one kind task a day doesn’t necessarily add up to an improved relationship, when I state a goal in language like this, I’ll know when I’ve achieved it, and then I can evaluate its effectiveness toward improving the relationship.

Measurable:

“I want to write more”, has a lack of energy. “I will write 1000 words per day, at least 5 days per week”, has energy that pulls me along. When I’m vague about what I say I will do, I’m vague with my actions. When I state my goal in measurable outcomes, I know how far I have to go, and I can celebrate when I cross the finish line.

Achievable:

“I want to bring peace to the world” may win you a beauty pageant, but it hardly inspires perseverance with the stuff of daily life. Set a goal you have a good chance of achieving, something more like, “I will work with my colleague to reach a mutually beneficial solution.” Set a stretch goal that inspires you to be more than you think you can be, but that in your heart you know you can achieve.

Realistic:

Can you achieve this goal with the time and resources you have? Training to run a marathon won’t happen in 2 weeks, and you might need a support team. In order to earn a living from teaching guitar, you need to know how to play guitar.  You can do it, for sure. But can you do it in the time frame? Have a good think about what’s realistic. There’s a greater danger that you sell yourself short and set your sights too low.

Time bound:

The difference between a dream and a goal is a plan, and a plan has a deadline. If you set no deadline for your goal, you’ll probably never get it done. “For the next few years, my priority is to clear my clutter.” Do you find that inspiring? “I will get rid of all the stuff in my cellar that I don’t need, and the rest will be in labeled boxes behind closed doors by the 31^st of July.” That makes me want to stand up and cheer!

Give yourself every chance to achieve your goals. Make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. Make them SMART goals.

You’ll never complete every item on your To Do list.  Your list grows quickly, and there are only so many hours in a day.

The secret to living a fulfilled life is to make your time count. Make the best of the time you have by learning to prioritize.

How to Prioritize

I previously wrote about The Power of Planning, and why following your own plan is important. I first make a plan for the week, and then each day create a To Do list for today.  I work from my weekly plan and include anything else that comes up for my attention. I prioritize my To Do list using the following 5 categories. These are listed in no particular order.

1. If I don’t do this, there could be dire consequences. Examples: buy gift for daughter’s birthday (tomorrow), file taxes (due today), refill empty birth-control prescription (or postpone date night 🙂 ).

2. I promised someone that I’d do this. If I’ve made an agreement with someone that I’ll get this done, then I want to get it done. Keeping my agreements with myself and others is a big part of my definition of personal integrity and self-esteem. Examples: I said I’d phone you this week, I promised myself I’d go to the gym today, I said I’d do the weekly shop,and I promised all of us that I’d be prepared for the meeting on Wednesday night.

3. If I do this, there may be big benefits. The lottery hucksters tell us, “If you don’t play, you can’t win.” Examples: If the deadline for applying for that perfect job is today, get your application in! Buy your plane tickets by today and get a whopping discount.

4. This is my work. I get paid to score Leadership Development Profiles, so it’s important to me to get them finished and returned on time. Examples: answer emails from prospective clients, arrive promptly for meetings and coaching sessions, follow through with what I say I’ll do (see number 2, above).

5. If I do this, I’ll feel good about myself. For me, this category puts fun into a ho-hum To Do list. Passionate involvement, deeply felt causes, or personal development projects all find a place at the table. Currently, I’m working on unfinished projects, and every time I complete one more, I feel GREAT!! I put two or three of them on my To Do list each week.

What will you achieve this week?

Related Reading

The Power of Planning: If you don’t already have a strong plan, make one now!

Eat that Frog: get the most important things done first

Rewrite your future: what you decide and choose today determines your future

I’m a great believer in the power of planning. If you aren’t working to your own plan, then almost anyone can hijack your attention and efforts to their cause. It’s not that you can’t have flexibility; you definitely can! But flexibility should come within your own plan for your life.

If you don’t have a plan, now is the time to make one!

If you aren’t sure where to start with your planning, here are some ideas that work for me.

Goals in roles.

We each wear quite a few hats in our lives; each of these is a role. Our goals can be chunked into goals by roles. For example, some of  my roles are wife, business owner (coach and consultant, which might be two separate roles), blogger and friend. When I think about what’s important to me, I consider each role. I might ask myself, ‘In order to be a better blogger, what do I want to achieve this week?’ This technique helps me to be sure I consider all the roles that are important to me, and lowers the chance of overlooking something that matters.

Steps toward a longer term goal.

What’s the most important goal you have right now? New job? Living somewhere different? Becoming self-employed? If you already have a big goal, break the journey down into manageable steps that you can work on today, or this week. For example, if you want to change jobs, what are 2 things you can do this week to get closer to this goal? What one thing can you do today? Put those actions into your plan.

Unfinished business.

When things are left unfinished or unresolved, they can become stressors. Unfinished business can affect your health, your sleep and your reputation with yourself. For example, I have an overdue commitment to finish transcribing a certain Scottish census from 1871. In this case, the problem is that I made a commitment to someone to do this task. As the weeks go by and I don’t complete it, my reputation with myself suffers. When I think about it, I groan inside, miserable that I haven’t done what I said I’d do, or renegotiated it. (In fact, I’ll do something about that today!)

Too many things to do.

Sometimes I’m simply overloaded with things to do. If I’ve any hope of getting beyond this feeling, I need to schedule them into my diary and then be quite disciplined about getting them done. I find that sometimes just getting them all down in a list of things to do, and then plugging away at the list item by item helps me feel I’m more on top of things. Or, I can ask for help (the list is evidence!) The cost of not doing this is loss of sleep, arguments with my husband and a general feeling of overwhelm.

I  encourage you to look at what’s the most important thing this week. What role needs attention? What long-term goal needs some forward motion? Is there any unfinished business eating away at you? Are you feeling overloaded?

You can do something about it. In fact, only you can do something about it, and you can start right now. What will you do today?

If you’d like to hear more detail about how I do any one of these types of planning, please leave a comment asking about it.

Related Reading

Rewrite your future – what you decide and choose today writes your future

Eat that frog – get the most important things done first

Consistency is underrated – one thing you can do to make a huge difference in your life

Karma is the law of consequences: what you do today has consequences tomorrow. Karma has nothing to say about blame, or about what you ‘deserve’. It’s simply that what your life is like today is a result of decisions and choices you made in the past. Of course, you can’t change the past, but you CAN change your future, by changing the choices and decisions you make TODAY.

If your life continues as it is today, what does the future promise? Look down the road to the probable outcomes and consequences of what you decide and choose today. This question is valid in your personal life, family life, career, relationships, education, personal development. In fact, it’s valid in any aspect of life that I can think of.

If you continue doing what you’re doing today, what future are you writing? If it’s not the future you really want, the time is NOW to decide how to change your ways today to write the future you want tomorrow.

Make sense?

What you have to do is take action!!

I wrote that awhile back and it’s been languishing in draft mode. Today I had a serious talk with myself about my blog, and pointed out to myself that although I say my blog is a high priority in my life, I don’t ACT as if it is. So here I am today, basically pulling myself up by the scruff of my shirt, shouting in my face, ‘Hey!! Expect more from yourself!’

If I continue this road of not writing for weeks, what sort of future am I creating? (Not to mention what sort of reputation am I building with myself. We won’t even go there!) If I keep not writing, here’s my future: full of regret that I didn’t do anything to help when I could have, unlikely I’ll have written that book, not a single person would have hired me to work with them on anything, one more abandoned blog site in the blog-o-sphere (with my name all over it, so my grandchildren can see me NOT doing what I said was important), self-confidence low because I don’t finish what I start (or do what I say I’m going to do), lots of fun missed out on, too much television watched, and so on.

What I needed to do was get leverage on myself. It’s easy to list the benefits of blogging. I can even see the benefits of not blogging. But what are the costs associated with each? The costs of blogging are website maintenance (which can be non-trivial), time spent finding out what people are wanting to read about, time spent in improving my writing skills, and also time spent improving my time management skills. So, now what are the costs associated with NOT blogging? All those listed in the paragraph above. That’s where my leverage lies!

In a nutshell: I don’t want the future that not-blogging ensures I’ll get more than I don’t want the future that blogging will bring. Get it? The cost to me of not blogging is high in terms of the future I create.

So here’s a blog entry. May you find that it relates to something you’ve been thinking about.

There are lots of people giving advice on how to be more productive, get more things done, stop procrastinating. It does seem like we all share the desire to be more effective in our daily lives.

I discovered something that’s helped me a lot!

Brian Tracy is a well respected and prolific productivity guru. His book Eat That Frog, was first published in 2004, and this link points to a newer edition.

The idea is simple.

Frog: any task that you’ve been putting off, where the consequences of putting it off are BIG. The consequences could be good, or bad.

• If you don’t do it, you’ll see BAD consequences. For example, don’t file your taxes and just watch that Frog hop into your life take away some of your hard-earned money!
• If you DO do it, you stand to win BIG! For example, you’ll never get the lead role in that film unless you go to the auditions!.

Eat: take care of it. Show up and do something about it.

Here’s how it works.

1. Every morning when you wake up, identify your biggest Frog, and then first thing, eat that Frog.

2. If you find you have several Frogs, eat the ugliest one first.

3. If the Frog is particularly ugly, don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Just gobble it up.

And that’s all there is to it.

I think I heard that Brian Tracy thought of this when he was watching a jungle reality TV show, and the contestants had some really awful, creepy things they had to eat. He thought that if the first thing he had to do in the morning was to eat a live frog, then the rest of the day could only get better. Or something like that.

So, tomorrow, awaken to your gently chiming Zen alarm clock. Then, first thing, think: Do I have any Frogs today? Ah, yes. I have two of them: ring the doctors for an appointment for that test, and finish that work I said I’d do this month (because it’s now the last day of the month!)

I find this is just the best for reminding me to get done first thing the most important thing.

What do you think?