Realistic Goal Setting

The importance of setting realistic goals...

I recently embarked on an ambitious personal project. However only a couple of weeks into the 2 month project, I realized that the plan I'd laid out just wasn't realistic. So where did I go wrong and how will I be more realistic about setting goals next time?

To start off with, I'd broken the project down into manageable pieces - tasks if you like. Each of the tasks was less than half of one day in duration. I then set out the tasks in logical order and estimated the total time it would take based on the time I had available to me. And based on these estimates, it was a 2 month project.

As I said before, after 2 weeks, I'd fallen well behind the schedule. I decided to take the time to work out what had gone wrong with my planning. When I went back through my completed tasks I confirmed that I was completing them in approximately the time I'd estimated. So why was I falling behind?

The answer turned out to be simple enough. I'd overestimated the amount of time I had available to work on my project each week. I'd been way too optimistic. This is natural enough. Some might say it's human nature. But the reality is that we all have family and friends that need our attention. And the best laid plans are easily derailed by unexpected events. There wasn't one single thing that ate into my available time but rather a whole raft of smaller things which collectively were enough to derail my project.

The danger now is that I could become discouraged and give up. This is what could happen if you set unrealistic goals for yourself. So what steps have I taken in my efforts in re-planning? Well there are 2 main things.

First of all, I have been a lot more realistic about how much time I have available. By being conservative, I'm hoping that I can remain on schedule and therefore stay motivated through to completion. Regardless of the strength of my time management skills, I just can't manufacture the extra hours I need out of thin air. And there is only so much sleep deprivation one can manage.

The other thing I've done is to schedule "catch up days". In fact one day each week has become a catch up day. The idea of this day is to tidy up any loose ends - any tasks which aren't quite complete or which didn't have a level of quality which I was happy with. This will help me to deal with anything unexpected which crops up during the week and should ensure a higher overall quality at the end.

Hopefully these steps will do the trick. With my new plan, built around some more realistic goal setting, I should be able to stay on track this time.

Improving Productivity Using A Task Based Approach

Is your personal productivity all that it could be? How much do you really get done during the average day or week. And how much time do you spend doing it? In this article I'm going to discuss how to use a task based approach to increase your productivity.

Task Based Or Time Based?

I used to spend a lot of time planning and worrying about how long I would spend doing something. During high school and university I would use time based planning to get things done. What does this mean? When planning out my week I would say - I'll spend 2 hours Monday night on Company Law and I'll spent 3 hours Tuesday night on Business Finance. In short, my time management strategy was to simply break my time up into blocks and throw these blocks indescriminately at the sunbjects I was studying.

So wht is the problem with this? Many of you will have spotted it already. For those that haven't, the problem lies in the lack of goals or specificity of objectives. It was easy for me to spend 2 hours "studying" Company Law but what did I actually achieve? Don't get me wrong - I knew what work was due and normally got it done on time. But it wasn't the most efficint way of doing things.

A Task Based Approach To Time Management:

I discovered a better way. Instead of saying I'll spend 2 hours on Company Law I would say I'll complete my Week 9 Company Law tutorial questions and complete the first 3 questions of the mid-semester assignment. The time allocated was the same but the goals had become specific. I would know at the end of the session whther I'd completed what I'd set out to do.

To use a task based approach, you'll need to break your work down into discrete tasks. Time is still important - in fact estimating times becomes critical to planning and scheduling. But time is secondary as a means of measuring progress. The primary method of determining progress is to ascertain whether the allotted tasks for that day have been completed.

Each task should be large enough to represent a significant step toward meeting your overall objective, but small enough to fit into one day, or preferably less. You'll need to be able to look back the end of a session or a day and tick off each of the tasks you've completed.

I switched over to this approach to time management towards the end of university and never looked back. And it's served me well in the years since then as well. In fact I would put down my increased productivity as a major step forward in my own personal development.

Personal Development Goals

What are your personal development goals?

In my last post, titled "What Is A Personal Development Plan?", I discussed the importance of goal setting as part of the personal development planning process. These goals form the foundation or nucleus of such a plan and as such are worth exploring in more detail. So today I'd like to discuss setting self improvement goals in more depth.

Setting goals for yourself can a more difficult task than you might initially expect. Sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to distill all of your life's dreams and ambitions into a handful of written statements. Where do you start? Where do you stop? How much detail should you go into? What follows is a series of tips to help you set personal development or self improvement goals for yourself.

Setting Specific Goals:

In order to succeed, you will need to make sure you have specific goals. Having vague or abstract goals makes achieving them that much more difficult. How will you know when you've met your target?

Numbers can be a great way of expressing goals. A number has a certain quality about it which gives you a fixed point of reference. As everything in life ebbs and flows, a goal expressed as a number stands out like a beacon, guiding you towards your destination. Instead of saying "I want to lose weight", you could re-state your goal as "I want to lose 7 pounds" or maybe "I want to reach my ideal weight of 160 pounds". Now as the days and weeks go by, each time you jump on the scales you'll watch yourself closing in on your target weight.

What Is Your Expected Date Of Achievement?

Deadline can be an ugly word. It has connotations of externally imposed time lines. So instead of deadline, let's use the phrase - "expected date of achievement". This gives a much more positive interpretation of the time by which you'd like to attain your goal.

But regardless of when we call it, it's important for us to consider not only the what but the when. Without a concrete time line in place it's easy to slip back into what used to be one of my favorite activities - procrastination. It's easy to find something else to fill your time. Then days slip into weeks and even months with no progress. The next thing you know, another year has passed and you still haven't done anything about starting that further education you'd been promising yourself.

Break Down Your Goals:

Make sure your goals are realistic. Rather than having one enormous goal, try breaking it down into two or more smaller ones. For example, if you wanted to run 8 miles in under 1 hour by the end of the year, you might set an intermediate goal of 4 miles in under 30 minutes by the end of September.

Setting these mini-goals can work wonders for your motivation. If you can tick off each of these smaller achievements on the way to your major milestone you'll feel like you're making more progress faster.

But What Are Your Goals?

How do you work out what your personal development or self improvement goals are? While some people have no trouble in clearly articulating what they want out of life, others may be less sure of themselves. If you fall into the latter category, how can you determine what you really want?

A technique I've found useful is to remove any constraints, obstacles or roadblocks, both perceived and real. What if money was no object? What if you had unlimited time? What would you do? Imagine you are independently wealthy - you have no need to work and have time on your hands. What would you do with yourself? What do you feel passionate about?

Or what if the opposite were true? You had limited time left (a comet is on a collision course with our planet - okay, maybe a little melodramatic, but you get the idea). What would you do with the time you had left?

Sometimes doing these mental exercises can be a good way to gain some perspective on things. Your mind has incredible power within it. Sometimes you just need some help to unleash that power. But that is a topic for another day...

There's no time like the present. Take some time out of your day and consider the question at hand. What are your personal development goals?

What Is A Personal Development Plan?

What is a personal development plan and how do you create one?

A personal development plan is like any plan - a series of steps laid out in a consistent and logical order with the aim of achieving one or more specific goals. In this case the focus of the plan is self improvement.

As with any endeavor, we need to establish our objectives in order to work towards them. And our own personal growth is no exception. What follows are some thoughts on how to approach this planning process.

Identify Your Goals:

Let's start at the beginning. What do we want to achieve? What do we want to change. What habits would we like to acquire and what habits would we like to lose? What do we like about ourselves and our lives and what would we like to change or improve?

This is a great opportunity for us all to take a step back and give serious consideration to where we are in our lives. As the days and weeks go past, it's easy for us to get so immersed in day to day activities that we lose sight of what's really important. But, by taking the time to consciously decide what it is that we want, we can re-focus our energy and efforts on what's really important to us.

Establish Priorities:

One of the dangers of personal development planning, or of any planning for that matter, is that of coming up with a wish list so long that we'll be overwhelmed. Many of us when faced with a lengthy to do list will get bogged down. Where do I start? How can I possibly get through all of this?

Sometimes we just end up back where started - or even worse off because we now have this extra list of things to do hanging over our heads.

So we need to establish priorities. What is most important to us? what needs to be done first? Is there a logical order we can establish.

One approach is to choose the top 3 things to work on and park the rest for the time being. Devote your energy to getting these things done before reviewing your goals again and choosing the next 3 highest priorities.

Another approach is to break your goals up into short medium and long term. The period is somewhat arbitrary, but short term might be within one year, medium term less than five years and long term being longer than that.

Set A Time Line To Reach Your Goals:

This leads neatly into setting time lines. Part of the planning process involves placing deadlines against tasks on the plan. And once again, planning for personal development is no exception.

Rather than just having a vague idea of what you want to do by when, give yourself a kick start by setting a due date. This will help you to get motivated. A self imposed deadline can be worthwhile if you hold yourself to it. And achieving that goal within that time-frame provides further motivation. You will feel better about yourself and be ready for the next challenge.

However, not all goals are well suited to setting completion dates. While you can give yourself a date by which you want to lose ten pounds, quitting smoking is a different proposition. Habit based goals are normally based on some sort of permanent change.

In this case, you might like to set duration based time-lines. What I mean by that is to establish a period of time over which you would like maintain a new habit. For example you might like to set yourself a goal of getting up one hour earlier everyday for the next 30 days. Once you've met that goal, you might like to extend it to 90 day or 180 days, although by then, hopefully the habit will have become permanent.

Be realistic:

While it's important to set aggressive goals, we don't want to make them so lofty that we have little chance of achieving them. Whether it's the size and scope of your goal or the time you've given yourself to achieve it, be realistic. Failing to achieve your goals can be a demotivating experience.

Take action:

It's all very well to sit down and formulate a plan, but you still need to do the work. Don't spend all of your time analyzing and planning. You will need to take action. Start at the beginning. It's amazing how motivating the feeling of making progress can be. You never know - you might enjoy it.

Review Your Plan:

The last step in the personal development planning process is to review your plan. Measure your progress against it. Anniversaries are a common time to undergo the review. It could be your birthday or the coming of a new year. These are times when we tend to be reflective anyway, so take the opportunity to review what you've achieved in the previous year and think about what you want out of the upcoming year.

Hopefully this article has given you some new ideas - or maybe reinforced some existing ones. Or at the least you will now be familiar with what a personal development plan is.