Know Your Goals

Welcome back!

Ever been disappointed by your results?

Have you ever found yourself being totally depressed by some results you got doing something?

While most often the frustration comes from the lack of results, it’s not uncommon at all to be frustrated simply because the results you’ve got aren’t exactly what you hoped for. So this is the situation when you actually are getting some good results, only for some reason you still feel frustrated about them. This is when you should know: it’s probably a good time to review your goals and expectations.

Goals and expectations must be set, reviewed and adjusted regularly

I’d like to give you just an example of what I mean. Since I’ve adopted personal development as a lifestyle, I’ve seen such a tremendous boost in my self-growth and general life enjoyment (and I was growing and enjoying my life to start with, trust me on this one!), that I definitely am happy I took this path. Still, there are moments now and then, when I feel frustrated about the lack of progress I make in some aspect of my personal development, and the more I analyze reasons for such frustrations, the more obvious it becomes: most of our frustrations are because of the wrongly chosen goals and incorrectly set expectations!

Another major reason for frustrations is simply not having enough attention paid to align with your goals. Whenever you have set your goals, make sure you get back to them now and then to realise if your actions are all aimed at reaching your goals. You don’t want to spend few hours, days or even months spent working only to realise that half of your efforts (and that’s a very optimistic  estimate) have gone the wrong direction and didn’t bring your goal any closer.

The third really big reason for being frustrated with your results is because of the lack (or total absence) of the time you take to review your goals and appreciate the accomplishments. In other words, not only should you regularly review your goals and make sure you’re working towards and not away from them, but you also need time to appreciate the achievements. Quite often you are in a position when something takes longer than you expected. But that’s a planning issue, not a goal setting one. So it is important to review your achievements to make yourself feel better – if you know you’re moving in a right direction, and if you have a list of accomplishments, and if you see that there are few more things to be done before you can finally reach the goal – that should be motivating, not discouraging.

For instance, back when I was only starting my personal development experiments, I had set a number of immediate goals which were directly based on the most obvious sources of my frustrations back at the time:

• I didn’t like the constant lack of time – and so it was a reason good enough to read more on time management.
• Some of my daily plans were not realised in time – and so I had to make proper planning arrangements and come up with a task-tracking system.
• I wasn’t learning enough in some areas of my interest – and so I had decided to discover new ways to find the time and motivation to learning even more.

All these major and minor frustration sources made my first goal setting an easy task. But what happens now is that, having reached these immediate goals, I have to set and aim the new ones. And it’s very important to always maintain the focus and appreciate the work you’ve already done.

I have many days when there is quite a number of things left unfinished or not even started by the end of a working day. Having just a couple of unfinished things is already enough to be a minor frustration. And that’s the last thing you want to happen at the end of an otherwise successful day, isn’t it?

It took me a bit of a discipline to learn the habit of doing a full-day overview, involving both finished and unfinished tasks, before I could learn to stop my frustrations completely. It’s really this simple: don’t ever let an unfinished task shadow the joy of having all the rest things done on time. Focus on the results you’ve got and appreciate how they bring you closer to your goals!

Knowing your goals is really important

If you’re a beginner, just make sure you have some goals set initially and that you’ve given each goal a thought. As you progress and become more and more comfortable with your self-growth, start keeping track of your goals and appreciating the progress you’re making towards them. And once you feel absolutely comfortable doing this, start reviewing your goals, adjusting them accordingly and even set brand new ones!

So here’s a very simplistic view on my approach to goal setting:

• set and know your goals
• keep track of your goals
• review, adjust and set new goals accordingly

There is no winning formula for timing these three stages. Their importance will grow as you grow personally. But it is always a good idea to know and review your goals, cause doing helps you discover just how much you’re really doing, and how quick you’re growing and where.

Having To-Do Lists Is Just Not Enough

I’m not a to-do lists person. Not anymore, anyway. You’ll see what I mean if you read about my recent To-Do Lists Revolution. Still, I have deliberately left quite a room for developing the topic, so there it is – yet another blog entry on to-do lists.

Thoughts described below are just an opinion of mine, and the aim of this entry is to help you make up your own view of to-do lists and decide whether they really are the best tool available for managing your daily tasks.

To-do lists are supposed to be a fairly simple and self-explanatory concept. You make and follow these lists to do stuff. Usually we refer to our daily to-do lists, but it’s not uncommon to have weekly or even monthly to-do lists as well.

To-Do lists are great for getting more things done that you’d normally do without such lists, but at the same time they’re not so great for lots of other aspects of your activities. In other words, simply having to-do lists is just not enough to stay on top of things. And in this entry, I’m going you show you why, and I will give you examples of how to-do lists don’t encourage and sometimes even slow down your progress.

Reaching your goals

If there’s one thing completely left out in traditional to-do lists, that’s the goals we’re trying to achieve. To-do lists are simply not about goals. You’re supposed to have your goals defined somewhere else, and keep them outside of the to-do lists routine.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get buried in your to-do lists. Quite often we get so thrilled with the idea of getting all the planned actions into our to-do list, that we forget to stop and ask ourselves, why exactly we’re going to do this thing or that one. This means that we’re still going to have many things done according to our list, but we’re not necessarily going to achieve the original goals which have triggered us working and creating to-do lists in first place.

So it’s important to stay conscious and be focused on the goals, not the tasks in your to-do list. If all you’ve got is your daily to-do list – you’re playing a dangerous game. You really need to take some time and analyze the current state of things in order to come up with your new goals or maybe simply correct the existing ones.

The good thing though is that you can always have a “Review goals” item on your to-do list for the day, and this will attract your attention and make you work more on your goals at the end of the day. And naturally, once you have worked out the habit of reviewing your goals daily or weekly, you can get this item off your lists.

Tracking progress

Again, because to-do lists are not meant to be a sophisticated progress tracking tool, you need something else to help you do this.

Daily to-do lists could be giving you a false impression of having everything completed each day, while in reality you may be nowhere near the completion of a bigger task or a project. You have to track your projects and goals with a separate process. Daily to-do lists are just too small a scale to reflect the overall state of your projects.

Staying motivated

For many people, to-do lists are a constant source of frustration. Whenever they start their day by looking at the list, they find the list to be too long. There are so many tasks and so little time to make them all happen, that it can easily depress people even before they get started. On odd days, it requires some real courage to dive into your to-do list and find a way to get most of the things done in a matter of just few hours. Some people always find this courage, but then some of us never do, so it could be a real problem even though making to-do lists and following them is somewhat the right way to go.

Routine may be another reason for your lack of motivation. When every workday starts with a long list of things to do, and you know that no matter how hard you work, you’re going to get a similarly long list for the following morning, at some stage you lose your interest. You don’t see any challenge in doing better that you already are, because each brand new day will invariably bring a brand new list full of not so exciting things you’re going to just have to work through.

So again, you need something else to keep you motivated. Reviewing your goals daily is a good start because it will help you realise how far you’ve progressed with each of your goals, and see the difference a paricular day has made.

That’s it for now, I don’t want to make this entry too long, so I guess I’ll write more on this topic later. I hope you found this useful, so please let me know if you did.

Knowing Where You Want To Be

I’m so used to most of my friends and colleagues wondering where in the world I always find time and energy to do the things I do, that I’ve finally decided to spend few minutes and give full answers to these questions.

The ultimate answer

First and foremost, the ultimate answer to all such questions: it’s all about having a clear vision in your mind. It’s about knowing where you want to be in not so distant future. It’s about being absolutely conscious that no matter how good or bad the current situation looks, it’s probably not the end of your journey.

I won’t claim knowing a special secret about setting your goals or anything like this – after all, I’m only learning to master the art of goal-setting myself. But I’m willing to share the few things I’ve learned so far, and I sincerely hope these pearls of wisdom would help you make the progress in your personal development you’re so hoping for.

Outcome vs Goal

One very simple thing I’ve learned is to treat my goals as outcomes.

Since all our achievements are nothing but the result of our self-confidence and determination, you really have be sure about what you should be doing to achieve the result you want. And what quite often happens is that we’re thinking goals, as in goals which sometimes seem too good to be true, or too far away to be easily reached, or simply too complex to be fully achieved. In other words, we set ourselves such goals that they’re always a possibility, but not a certainty.

You think: “Yeah, wouldn’t it be great to have more time freed up for my family?!… I should probably try and do something to make sure I don’t work late hours and don’t take up more projects than I physically can…” So the goal of having more time sounds like a good idea.

But because we’re not sure how much more time we’d like to free up, and how it’s going to look and feel, and when it’s going to happen, it’s REALLY hard to achieve such a goal. Quite simply, you’re not giving yourself a chance to know when you’re approaching your goal and when you’ve really achieved it. But what if we consider this goal to become an outcome?

Outcomes are always certain. There is no probability here at all, not a shadow of doubt about getting an outcome – whether we like it or not, we’re going to get some outcome following our actions. It may not be quite the outcome you were aiming for, but it will be an outcome. We have to look at this goal and see what the outcome is going to be for us.

What will really improve when you get more time freed up? How will it improve in your opinion? How much time do you really need to see such an improvement? Would 1 extra hour a day be good enough, or do you want two hours?

So just knowing that there’s something you’re going to get helps you look at the whole plan of yours from a completely different perspective. It’s no longer a question of whether something happens or not. It an outcome now, it’s a thing certain to happen. And just like that, in an instant, you see a magical transformation for a vague goal into a sharp certainty quite possible to be achieved.

Ultimate goals

Every one of us should have ultimate goals. There shouldn’t be too many of them, but you absolutely need at least a few. They would be your guiding lines – something you always keep in mind in every effort you’re making. For instance, my ultimate goals are the driving force behind most of my actions.

There’s an odd action now and then which doesn’t fall into any of my ultimate goals but that’s the truth of life – you can’t turn every action required and expected from you to be beneficial.

Sometimes (as it probably happens with your job, for instance), you have to do things which are part of someone else’s ultimate goal or vision, but that’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it?

I don’t want to give you a list of my ultimate goals – partially because I’m changing them all the time, make some of them more accurate and therefore easy to follow, or just reordering them to ensure the most important goals are the first ones I work on. Also it is because no ultimate goal of mine is final – once I reach the goal, I simply make the milestone and develop the goal into a bigger one, so that it’s a constant pursuit of something bigger and better. For me such a state of things is nothing but a pure and constant motivation.

When I have a clear vision of my future, I have a list of my goals – and I know I’m always doing my best to get closer to them. But if my goals were finite, I would simply be disappointed once I’d reached them. So I always push my goals higher and further apart. This way I have the motivation to grow and continue to do what I’ve been doing.

Knowing where you want to be

Many of you will find that it’s much easier to know where you don’t want to be! That’s good enough, work from there! Don’t be so hard on yourself, but simply try being conscious about your current position. For me, I always know there’s something else waiting for me ahead in the future. And this motivates, not disappoints me.

Every time I go to gym I KNOW it’s not the last time I’m going to do it. Right now my goals could be about losing some weight or growing some muscles, but even when I do reach these goals, I’m sure I’ll transform them into some other goal like making sure I stay healthy and physically active for as long as possible.

Every time I’m learning something new in my profession, I KNOW it’s just another piece of useful information. I’m sure that if there’s a chance to learn something else, and provided that I have enough time for it, I’ll go for it. I’ll never stop learning. Every time I write an entry in this blog, I’m ABSOLUTELY SURE it’s not the last one. Because there’s always going to be something else I can learn to help myself grow, to try it out and to share it so that others could enjoy the results too.

Knowing where you want to be is very important. It’s not a set of goals, but more like a vision. It’s a number of your wildest dreams you want to come true once day. It’s all these things which you’re finally going to achieve. And that’s the energy and motivation to keep you going even when no one else believes in you. It doesn’t matter. Y

YOU know better what’s good for you and for your goals.

What about YOU?

Do you know where you want to be? You may not have a clear vision of your future, but let me assure you – even feeling that you’re not quite there is a good start! Don’t stop there! Try and make the next step. Find some time and analyze your goals – both everyday and ultimate ones. See what’s really important for you and start paying them more attention. This is the effort you have to make as it will eventually make all the difference for you.

Don’t worry about so much work to be done. Don’t be afraid to dream of a better future. Don’t be discouraged if something doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to. It doesn’t mean anything! You can do much more than you think you can, and as long as you know where you want to be and you keep working on getting there, you’re going to be just fine!

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