Goal setting has become an art and there has been plenty of research conducted on the best way to achieve your goals. Other than the fact that you must think of them and have them documented somewhere, the research seems to be all over the place.
You should set small goals so you can achieve them. You should also have large stretch goals so they push and excite you. You should tell everyone about your goals, you should tell only a few close friends your actual goals. You should look at them every day, and put them in your wallet. These are just a few of the goal ‘should’s’ I have read about in the last couple years.
© Patty Keenan
Well, I am not here to “should” you. I am here to tell you to do what works for you in setting and achieving your goals. Like any great leader observes all the quality traits of leaders they have worked with to produce a leadership style that works for them, I recommend you do the same for goal setting. Goal setting is personal and what works for you may not work for someone else.
For example, about ten years ago I read a book on goal setting, you know, one of those with ‘millionaire’ in the title. The whole premise of the book was to write your ideal scene in five years’ time. This was built around establishing a number of key goals and a detailed plan to accomplish each goal. I can picture myself now writing out the plan as I sat at the kitchen table in the little house I was renting in Lander, Wyoming.
© Paul Worthington
While the process of trying to picture the future and coming up with a way to create it was fun, five years later I had achieved little that I came up with that day and I was certainly a long way from becoming a millionaire. In fact, my life had changed in a way that five years later I wasn’t interested in achieving most of the goals I set out that day and my ideal scene looked quite different. The point is there is no right or wrong way to achieve your goals.
While the process of trying to picture the future and coming up with a way to create it was fun, five years later I had achieved little that I came up with that day and I was certainly a long way from becoming a millionaire. In fact, my life had changed in a way that five years later I wasn’t interested in achieving most of the goals I set out that day and my ideal scene looked quite different. The point is there is no right or wrong way to achieve your goals.
To give you another perspective on goal writing, I want to share with you the system I am now using to record my work and personal goals. I have developed a daily goals sheet template that blends the concepts on Gary Keller’s wildly popular book The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results and Dave Delany’s, of New Business Networking, NBN Daily Goals document.
The system I use involves writing my goals on paper, yes on paper, with a pen, daily. For the last few years, I have tried keeping my goals in my online calendar, few different goal setting apps, Google docs and lastly I was trying to keep them on Evernote. A couple of challenges I had with these were that I couldn’t easily see them in front of me throughout the day and as I would achieve the goals I would usually delete them.
The problem I had with this is that I would often forget what my goals were that I wanted to achieve, causing me to become unfocused with my time. Moreover, when I would have meetings with my accountability partner and mastermind groups and they would ask what I have accomplished sense the last meeting, my mind would go blank, leaving me wondering ‘what have I accomplished anyway?’
My current system has me writing down my goals on a sheet of paper every day that lives in a classic three-ring binder (yes they still make those). I have a binder full of these templates that get filled in before I leave the office for the following workday. I do this so that I don’t have to think about what I need to accomplish first thing in the morning. The goal sheet starts off with listing two gratitude’s of the day. A friendly reminder of the things I am grateful for.
Next, based on Keller’s book, I have boiled down my goal list to two groups: #1 the One Thing that needs to be completed that will make everything else easier or unnecessary and #2 everything else. I write my One Thing for the month, week and day. This is the key, every day of the month I write out my monthly goal and each day of the week I write my weekly goal. How can I forget my goals now when I repeatedly physically rewrite them out every?
Next, I write out my One Thing for the day. Typically, this item is completed in the first two hours of the workday. These first two hours are usually the most productive hours in a workday when you have the least amount of distractions and your mind is at its sharpest. This allows me to give myself a little pat on the back and confidently move on to accomplishing everything else that needs to be completed but was not my One Thing for the day.
Personal goals are just as important as work goals so I have a section to write my Personal Success for the day. For me, this usually involves doing something fun with the kids or completing my workout for the day. A newer practice I have incorporated into my daily routine, which I got from Dave’s goals doc, was to introduce at least two people from my network everyday. This is an easy way to add value to and potentially grow your network. If there is someone in my network you want to be introduced to, just send me a note.
Finally, the goals sheet ends with a list of Everything Else that needs to be accomplished today, such as cleaning my inbox, making calls, creating lists, posting blogs, cleaning the office, doing taxes, picking up groceries, etc. These things need to be completed but are not important enough to make it to the One Thing. I will often have items on this list carry over to the next day and some eventually move to the One Thing if they are not addressed.
So, that’s the reason I have moved back to paper to write my goals. If you would like a PDF copy of my Daily Success sheet (seen below) sent to you, just drop me an email at sstratton@livemoregroup.com with the title Daily Success and I will send it out right away.
© Shawn Stratton
That’s what works for me, how about you? In the comments below, tell us what systems you use to track your goals and why it works for you.
