New Year’s resolutions are cliched. Many people make them. Few people remember them months later.
However, clear resolutions can be a powerful way to boost your business. And January, after the hectic chaos of the holidays, is the perfect month to develop simple measurable goals you can remember and keep throughout the new year.
Goals are problematic. Some people love constraints; they eagerly make, refine, and achieve their goals. Other people, like myself, grudgingly acknowledge the value of structure but resist too much control. Still other people insist the best decisions are made by responding to their business life as it happens. They argue goals are a “nice to have” but not relevant in the chaos of their business life. Goals ruin their spontaneity, their fun.
This article describes a simple approach I use to keep on top of my goals while letting me forget that I’m on a tether. Perhaps my process will help you this year as you make resolutions.
First, There Are Good Goals
Most people are skittish about goals. They’re seen as burdens, a necessary evil.
To get myself over a deep prejudice towards goals, I ignore the fact that goals limit my actions. Instead, I divide goals into types. I embrace the types of goals that help me and religiously avoid the ones that drive me nuts. Task goals, broken out by client and project, help me remember what to do every day. Basic goals, as you’ll see, help me enjoy my work. Simple life and business goals help steer me over months and years.
Besides dividing goals by type, I also limit how often I check my progress. In November and December every year, I take a little time to look back at my goals for the year and create goals for the new year. Otherwise, I look at my goals on a monthly basis and think about them only as they become relevant on any day or week.
For example, one of my goals last year was to get control of my schedule. Days when my workload buried me with more deadlines than hours, I made time to figure out if I had met my “workload is killing me” goal (if true, the crushing workload could not be helped) or if I needed to find a better way to control my schedule. Despite real struggles, I had a lot more time off last year (you know, weekends), and a lot less stress, because I had set such a simple goal. I could remember it.
On a monthly basis, I looked to see if I had a list of tasks broken out by client and projects, my primary solution to meet my goal to control my schedule. Some months I did not because I gave up on the software that I’d bought at the start of this year. It injected more control than I wanted in my life. July through October I reverted to my beloved tall yellow Post-It Notes.
In October, however, I hit on the idea of using a basic Excel spreadsheet to manage my tasks, using a categorization scheme from the software I had bought earlier. That works beautifully. It works better than Post-It Notes, which is saying something.
Don’t be afraid of goals. Don’t believe that you must check them daily. Don’t believe you need more than 1-3 goals to make them work.
Let’s start with basic goals, the ones I use to make sure that my overall work and personal life are in balance.
Start With Basic Goals
These are the easiest goals to explain, make, and keep. There are three basic goals I have year in, year out:
- Have Fun — It is hard to enjoy life if you’re stressed, angry, and generally upset
- Learn New Things — This is a sure way to have fun and keep from being bored by work or people
- Help Others — Besides the karmic value (what goes around comes around), this is a great way to have fun and keep engaged
I keep these goals by asking myself simple questions from time to time, usually in the early morning when I rehearse my schedule for the day. Depending on the challenges ahead that day, I ask myself one of these questions: “How can I have fun today?” or “What can I learn?” or “Who could I help?”
For example, a day spent in phone meetings is probably the perfect day for me to make time to have fun. That might mean half an hour to call a friend, or eat at a special place for lunch, or just flop in the hammock outside our home office. Days without specific deadlines are good days to ask, “What can I learn today?” Especially if I’ll need to know something next week or next month on another project.
If I didn’t have these basic goals, I’d be a workaholic. Every problem would be a crisis that demanded my full attention. I know that life too well. I hate it.
Task Goals
Honestly, these are the most problematic type of goal for me. I can stomach them only when I’m part of a large project that involves many people who must pull together. On these projects, there is no better way to document all that must be done.
While I can obsess for hours over the details of building a Gantt chart, trying to make the tasks clear and relevant while figuring how best to relate one task to others, I resist the deep level of control project schedules involve.
My advice is to use Gantt charts, highly detailed project schedules, only when they provide real value. When you do use one, scan all the tasks so you can see how your work fits in, then extract your tasks into a list you can use to focus your work.
If appropriate, for example, on software development projects, be sure to use project plan templates that have worked in the past. That will help you and others “memorize” over time the kind of tasks required, easing the negative impacts of these schedules.
Then again, if you love to be in a harness, you are lucky. For people like myself who are profoundly fearful of wasting time, make the most of project schedules but also find ways to pull out your contribution. This approach helps minimize the terror I feel when I see a project plan with dozens of tightly integrated line items.
Business Goals
In my experience, a good business goal is simple. For example, increase revenues by increasing a type of client. Or increase revenues by increasing customer satisfaction and improving your referral process from these newly happy customers.
While a simple business goal can have many different tasks associated with it, the simplicity of the goal itself helps keep it top of mind even in the most chaotic work environment.
How do you find simple business goals? Look at your business.
Run through your head your impression of your business in the past year. What sort of problems happened over and over? Maybe you had one problem that made you stop and think, a problem that suggested a new future direction for your business.
Another way to find simple business goals is to ask yourself if you had fun with your business in the past year. If not, for what reasons? How do you define fun? Is it learning? Is it helping others? Is it complex challenges? This line of thought can lead you to what gets you excited about your business, what gets you up in the morning. It may be that you’ve lost enthusiasm and your goals, as a result, should focus on getting back your excitement for what you do.
Here’s another way to pull out simple business goals. Think of the different aspects of your business. Successful entrepreneurs engage their business on three levels: the entrepreneur with an eye out for future opportunities, the technician who meets and exceeds the customer’s needs, and the manager who looks back at past effort with an eye to optimization and reductions in costs and time.
Now evaluate your work in the past year. How did you do with these three levels? Were you, like most entrepreneurs, too focussed on your technician role? One clue is a strong hatred for doing the books, by the way. I have that phobia. I would much rather write the perfect copy for a client, or build the perfect website. (See the E-Myth book link below if you want to learn more about these ideas.)
Once you have come up with a short list of possible goals, really areas where you can improve your business, then you should evaluate them in some depth.
A note about terminology. There is a lot of confusion about the definition of goals, tasks, and strategies. To me, a business goal could actually be a task repeated over and over while still remaining a goal, for example, writing daily tasks on a Post-It note. But technically that is a task, not a goal, as you will see. This article is about the New Year’s resolution kind of goal, the markers you write down and measure yourself against.
Whether your markers are technically a goal, strategy, or tactic matters only as a way to evaluate possible goals, to dig into what you want to accomplish.
The easiest way for me to evaluate possible simple business goals is to evaluate them in terms of goals, strategies, and tactics:
- Goals — The simplest broad expression of a desire, for example, to live a happier life
- Strategies — More specific expression of ways to achieve a goal, for example, the strategies “control your schedule” or “look better” could achieve the goal of living a happier life
- Tactics — Think of these as practical tasks that achieve strategies which, in turn, achieve a goal
For example, buying a new wardrobe is a tactic to implement the strategy of looking better which, in turn, might help achieve the goal of living a happier life. Using yellow Post-It Notes is a fool’s tactic to implement the strategy of controlling your schedule which helps achieve the goal of living a happier life.
With possible goals in front of me each year, I ask myself if each one is technically a goal, strategy, or tactic. The question often pulls out a hidden resolution I had not noticed. It’s also possible sorting your goals this way will uncover an underlying connection that you really want to focus on.
For example, you may have a few resolutions that really are tactics to achieve a strategy and goal you had not articulated. That will get you closer to a resolution that will be memorable and effective.
If you find that you have a bunch of goals that turn out to be tactics, but no strategy goals, ask yourself what your tactics will achieve? How will executing the tactics change your life or business? What difference will they make? The answers should help you uncover one or more strategies and goals that underpin your tactics.
Life Goals
The difference between a business goal and a life goal is rather obvious to me. I don’t expect my work life to save my soul, or justify my existence, no matter how thrilling it is for me to work with clients, build a business, and make something out of nothing.
A life goal, however, taps into what is special about each of us and helps draw those qualities out in constructive ways. Life goals make our ambitions a little more real.
If you are a frustrated creative like me, someone who secretly wants to be an artist or a motorcyle racer, or something other than your current life, you probably have life goals that you’ve ignored for years. For everyone else, a life goal is often a deferred dream, perhaps to spend more time with your kids. Or maybe you’ve always wanted to teach.
Whatever the source of your life goal, it reflects your perceptions about what makes you special. If you can complete the questions, “I’m alive because …” and “My life matters because …” and “If I had never been born, then … would not happen,” you have at least one view of yourself that is or can become a life goal.
Another way to tease out life goals is to ask yourself what you would want to do if you had enough money to live the way you want to live. Would your life be more calm, or more active? Would you take more risks and, if so, what risks?
These personal goals, I find, divide themselves neatly into experience goals and life goals.
For example, I would love to fly a float plane. That’s an experience I’d love to have many times. But would I be eager to live in the Alaskan wilderness for forty years as a guide flying a float plane on and off lakes? Probably not. So being a bush pilot, for me, is an experience goal.
Once you identify one or more of your personal goals, the next step is to become very specific about steps you can take to achieve them.
With a life goal written down on paper, jot down all the things you’ll need to make that goal real. For example, if you want to teach third grade, you’ll need a teacher certification, you’ll need to find a school where you want to teach, you’ll need to make financial adjustments (possibly) to your current life, and so on.
With that raw material, answer these questions:
- In a perfect world, I would love to be a …
- When you achieve this goal, what is one concrete manifestation of your achievement (e.g. being published, completing a year of teaching)?
- In five years, where would you like to be with respect to your goal and the concrete manifestation of that goal?
- What action can you take this year to achieve your goal?
- What action can you take this month to achieve your goal? This week? Today?
- Who is a role model that embodies the life you want to lead?
These questions are from an excellent book, The Artists Way, geared towards blocked creatives like me. However, it is a twelve week program that takes some time to complete. Their process changed my life, turned it upside down, by helping me to see that I should fit my work life into my creative life, not the other way round.
However you do it, be sure to spend time thinking about what you want to accomplish with your life, not just your business.
Smart readers will see where I’m heading. This exercise, as with the business goal exercises, will generate a lot of specific goals as well as tasks to achieve those goals. The more you can suspend your disbelief, put aside the worries that consume your business today, the more data you will generate and the better your goals will be.
With lots of raw data for goals and tasks, the next step is to organize your information in a way that does not overwhelm your life.
Tracking Goals Without Going Nuts
How you track your goals depends upon your personality.
If you hate organization, the best method is to narrow your goals down to two or three key goals, write them down on a piece of paper, then stick them on a wall near your desk where you can see them. That’s the easiest approach.
If you are like me, and you don’t mind a small amount of organization, in my case because I forget things easily, the best method is to put your goals into an Excel spreadsheet. Why not a Word file? Excel lets you sort your goals based on due dates, priority, and other criteria.
If you like lots of organization, the best method to track your goals is to use a Franklin Planner, at least their software if not their whole system which includes a binder, special pages, and so on. That approach does not work for me, I’ll be honest. Managing my goals with a dedicated piece of software turned out to be too much like nagging to me.
If you use an Excel spreadsheet, you are welcome to start by adapting the spreadsheet that I’ve developed (see below for a link to download it). Like the Franklin Planner software that I tried (and failed to adopt), I rate the priority of my tasks with a nine-part scale: A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, and C3.
The easiest way to explain how to use these nine ratings is to use the A ratings for tasks due in the next week or two. The A1 items should be few in number and due today or tomorrow. You want as few A1s as possible. Why? For me, it’s depressing to have 20 top priority tasks on my list.
The B ratings are for projects due in a month where it is useful to break out the tasks now. I find that some of these B tasks can be done early simply because they’re on my list.
I also find that B tasks are great sources for the “Learn New Things” basic goal mentioned above. Usually B goals involve projects I know will happen in a few weeks or months and often they require preparation, including learning new things or trying solutions before the actual project hits.
The C ratings I rarely or never use. For me they represent underlying goals, really my business or life goals, that I track on another sheet in my Excel spreadsheet.
With my tasks rated, and due dates typed in, I then use the Data > Sort feature in Excel to sort by Rating then Due Date then Project/Client. This simple feature reduces a lot of my stress spent figuring out the proper order, making sure I’ve got all my A1 rated tasks at the top of my sheet. It frees me to simply type in tasks with no concern for their final order.
I then print out my spreadsheet of active tasks every few days and hand write updates to the printouts as I work along and complete tasks. I print out my goal spreadsheet every month, and take a moment to assess how I’m doing in achieving those goals.
How Many Goals are Too Many Goals?
The simple answer is 1-3 goals each for your business goals and your life goals, for a total of 2-6 goals. Anything more winds up frustrating me and dilutes my efforts.
The first step is to prioritize your goals and identify the 1-3 business goals and life goals you want to accomplish this year.
Next, document your work tasks and keep them separate from your business and life goals. I do this by keeping tasks and goals on two different sheets within my Excel spreadsheet. Business and life goals generate tasks to achieve them, certainly, but they are different from tasks.
With your goals in a place separate from your tasks, it becomes easier to revisit them monthly or quarterly to ensure that you are still on goal.
My experience is that I’ll forget a goal, or two, only to rediscover them a month later. The rediscovery provides distance and insight into what I really want to accomplish. That, in turn, leads to ideas about how to achieve my “lost” goal. If I had written the goal down in a notebook, or a Post-It Note, I would have lost the goal.
Hopefully doing some or most of what is suggested in this article will generate useful ideas for goals and tasks. Once you have simple goals in hand, the key to success, of course, is to organize this material in a way that does not overwhelm you.
Additional Resources
My Excel Spreadsheet for tracking goals
Franklin Plan Plus software
The Artist’s Way (book)
E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It (book)
