Planning & Measuring Goals

I have seen that when I define a goal and give a deadline, most often than not I tend to achieve it. This has made me believe that having a goal and having a plan to back it up is very important in life. I know for sure that all are not in your control but assuming that things go according to plan will definitely help you reach your goal.

Sometimes I miss out on achieving my goals but due to a plan in place, I can go back and find out the reasons behind the failure. This then helps me to tweak my plans so that I go forward with the same zest the next time and try and achieve the goal.

As stated above, from my personal experiences, it’s very important to have “Goals” or “Objectives” when you first sit to plan it out. And this planning could be for anything, personal or professional.

Bear one thing in mind that goals should be measurable. Always, keep it simple. Do not write a goal that is 3 sentences long. Remember, in the future, you can come back to this document to connect the dots and at that time it should be easy for you to remember/understand. After writing down a goal, put an imaginary question mark and the answer to that question should always be in yes or no. If the goal can be answered in yes or no then it’s a measurable goal.

You can’t have a goal like, “I will read books this year”. This is not really a measurable goal. As I say it, you are your own competitor so write down, how many books you plan to read this year and then measure it month on month.

Types of Goals:

There are two types of goals

• Long Term Goals
• Short Term Goals

Write down your goals on paper (Notepad or Google docs) and give a definite deadline to both short and long-term goals. It’s always important to have a deadline for your goals. Once you have a deadline, you will plan out how you are going to reach that deadline. A goal without a deadline is not really a goal. But, remember do not stress yourself out if you miss a deadline. It’s not imperative that you will reach all your goals within a specified time. You can fail too. But the advantage here would be that since you are monitoring and measuring your performance, you will know why you failed, what you learned and this will effectively mean that you will now know what you need to do, to avoid this failure next time around.

Once you have completed writing your goals, next​,​ write down the pointers or the pathway to reach that goal.

These are generally the activities that you need to do on a daily or regular basis to reach your goals. Habits fall under this category too. We are all slaves to our habits. So change your habits that align you towards your goal. Say, for example, you have a goal to write a book this year. So you will have to plan the title, the plot, the characters, the chapters, the number of hours you will need to put in to write the book, editing, publishing, and marketing plan, etc.

Now that you have written down your goals and you have defined a pathway, it’s extremely important to keep monitoring yourself. Once in a week go back to your goal sheet and update how far you have reached. If you have been able to break down your goals into micro short-term goals then keep a close watch and see to it that you are on track.

If you see yourself faltering then you need to ask yourself why it happened and how you can get yourself back on track. When you do this every week, you can’t veer away too much but if you don’t monitor regularly, at least initially then you might lose the habit and if you veer too much away from the ​set ​goal then it might become very difficult for you to reach your goal within the specified time.

Ideally, you can have:

• A 10-15 year long term goal (ambition/dream etc)
• One 3 year goal
• One yearly goal that can be broken into quarterly goals

As you keep hitting your quarterly goals ask yourself if you can do slightly better than the previous quarter. Try and stretch your goals a little bit to keep yourself uncomfortable! Use the concept called, “Power of 1%“. Try to be better by 1% each day than the previous day. Remember, you are your competitor. You are not competing or comparing yourself with anyone. It’s you who is important and hence trying to be better than yourself every day, is a very good habit to have.

Too much comfort, in the long run, takes you away from your goals, and hence this weekly monitoring and trying to do better than the previous month or quarter helps you ​to ​keep​ yourself​ on track! This is the reason I always advise to remain slightly uncomfortable. Once comfort seeps in, hubris set in, and once hubris set in, you are bound to fail, sooner rather than later. So, never get too comfortable.

You can only reach your ambitious goal by shooting down your short-term goals.

The keyword here is consistency. Keep up with your set habits and show up every day and keep hustling.

So what are you waiting for?

Get a notepad and start writing down your goals!

Are you doing it?

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