Don’t Forget to Set Your Goals or Your Time management Will Get You Nowhere

Business Articles | April 20, 2010

Our lives are getting more complex every day. Anyone who wants to succeed and compete must learn how to manage time effectively and become more productive. One of the most important tools in time management is to understand what you really want. Suppose you learn skills or discover tools that let you become faster. Now, if you don’t know where you are going or what you want, it is likely that you will be going fast in a direction that will not necessarily benefit you. It seems that knowing your goals can significantly help you to avoid wasting time and become enormously more productive.

Extensive research in this area shows that people who have goals, especially strong goals in the earlier parts of their lives, can become significantly more successful in life.

Goal setting is a skill and like all skills it must be mastered by practice and persistence. Consider the following goal; “I want to become rich”. There are several problems with this goal. What does it mean to be rich? When do you want to become rich? At what point would you declare yourself rich? What happens then?

Just about everyone likes to be rich or richer. However, history shows that those who go on to become rich are those who set themselves very defined and specific goals that was nothing like “I want to get rich”. In fact successful people usually have some other goal and they get rich only indirectly as a result of getting to their goals (obviously we are ignoring getting rich randomly such as winning lottery).

To set appropriate goals and improve your time management, you need to follow five golden rules:

Rule 1: Define SMART Goals

SMART is a handy acronym that beautifully captures the essence of goal setting. It stands for the following:

Specific. Your goal must be well defined. Example: “I want to earn £100,000”
Measurable. You need to be able to measure your progress towards this goal. This allows you to know when you get there or if you are going wrong. Example: “I want to earn £100,000 a year no later than in three years time.”
Achievable. You must feel and believe that you can actually achieve this goal. For example if you set your goal as, “I want to go to Mars”, then it is possible that this will never happen. Set a goal that you can see yourself getting there.
Realistic. The goal must be realistic and logical. This is particularly important as you set various goals for yourself. For example, if you commute to work by car and set a goal as, “I want to cut my travel time by 30 minutes” and another goal as, “I want to cycle to work”, then you may not be able to achieve both if the cycling is going to take longer.
Timely. The goal must have a well defined time stamp. You should know how long you have to achieve it and also how it fits with your other goals. Remember the Parkinson law, “Time expands to fill the time available to it”. Make sure you set your deadlines wisely, not too short and not too long.

Rule 2: Define Motivating Goals

Make sure your goals inspire you. If you are passionate about something, you will put more energy into it. This in turn allows you to work harder, longer and faster which will enormously increase your productivity and improve your time management.

In contrast if you set yourself goals that you “must” do, then it is likely that you may not feel that enthusiastic which can lead to procrastination and failure. If you have goals that must be done, think of something positive in it and bring this positivity out. A good trick to use here is to ask yourself, “If I wanted to give this goal to someone else, how would I state it so that they are encouraged to do it”. You can use your own answer to this question to formulate your goal.

Rule 3: Write Your Goals

Goals that are not written down can be easily forgotten or morphed into something else. A simple time management trick that can help you a lot to achieve your goal is to set yourself periodic reminders to look at your written goal. Every time you get reminded of your goal, you may consciously or unconsciously take steps to get closer to it.

Rule 4: Work Backwards

Once you have identified your goals, you need to know what to do to get there. Just like finding a solution to a maze, start from your goal and work backwards to your current situation. This allows you to see where you should be at each stage and set a number of mini-goals.

Rule 5: Be Persistent

Goal setting is not a fire-and-forge activity. You need to stick with it, get back to your goals, review them, update them, even modify them as you progress in your life. Remember, you must set new goals as you approach previously set goals so you know what to do next when you get to your goals. The process never finishes and you certainly don’t want to find yourself aimless or bored due to lack of goals. People who suffer from mid-life crisis usually do so because they finally achieve the goals they set themselves when they were in their 20s. Lack of new goals suddenly makes life and living pointless. Make sure you always have some.

Goal setting along with other important productivity guidelines are included in time management training materials suitable for trainers who may wish to teach these concepts to their potential clients.

Article Tags: Time Management, Goal Setting, Goal Must

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Anderson provides training consultancy in areas of soft skills training material, management training, human resources training, communication skills and leadership. He is based in a UK company that provides downloadable soft skills training materials for trainers, businesses and training houses. For productivity resources see free training materials.