Setting (and Following-Through on) Personal Goals
I have an old friend who would sometimes tell me, tongue-in-cheek, "It's easy to be successful. Just lower your standards." It's a good joke, but lurking just beneath is the Pink-Floydian implication that all your potential for a fantastic life (however you personally define that) could slip away from you if you're not careful. Putting it somewhat more seriously is the old proverb that success in life is just a matter of starting with an excellent obituary and working backwards. It morbidly but effectively makes the point that the clock is always ticking, and it also implies that it's never too late to take steps toward the kind of life you will look back on with satisfaction. That feeling of passing time and a desire to live a more meaningful life is the motivation for a lot of self-examination and goal-setting. I have to admit that when it comes to setting personal goals, for most of my life I've been more aligned with the sarcastic faux-nihilism of despair.com than the traditional orthodoxy of personal development gurus. Lately though, I've been taking my own personal goals more seriously. ("And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you...")
The ticking clock may provide some motivation for goal-setting, but actual enthusiasm for it (and even enjoyment) can come from putting very positive advice like that found in this article by Steve Pavlina into practice. His main argument is that personal goal-setting is best approached as a single-minded effort in the one area of your life that you feel is lagging behind the others instead of a shotgun blast in a bunch of different life areas. Maybe it's physical health, maybe it's finances, maybe it's personal relationships. Pick one thing to focus on for the entire year instead of making a laundry list of New Year's resolutions that are usually forgotten well before the end of January. As you achieve success in that one trouble area, you get the strong feelings of accomplishment that reinforce the value of the goal-setting process and turn it into an annual habit. Which is a good thing, because success in that one area leads to a desire for success in others. And so on.
Even though Steve's technique feels most appropriate at New Year's, goal-setting doesn't need to be limited to the changing of the calendar. David Allen has a lot to say about achieving goals in his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. He proposes a "natural planning model" which he presents in the form of a step-by-step, top-down process. The key to effective planning is to take the important questions in the right order: (a) purpose and principles (i.e., Why is this important? How is it consistent with my/our values?), (b) outcome visioning (i.e., imagine what achieving the goal will look like - how will it make things different?), (c) brainstorming (i.e., what pieces need to fall in place for the goal to be achieved?), (d) organizing those brainstormed ideas into a plan and (e) identifying a next action that you need to take to follow through on the plan. It's important to say that this model is meant to be general - you can use it for all kinds of different projects, not just the life-improvement kind. But it certainly does seem like a great approach for setting and achieving personal goals.
Let's say you set a goal for yourself of chopping X thousand dollars off your credit card debt over the coming year. The purpose is to relieve stress, lower interest payments, and bring your finances in line with the principle of living your life under your own steam, without being dependent on the kindness of bankers. Envisioning the outcome leads to a picture of new possibilities for money that would have gone to interest payments, not to mention a big boost to the self-esteem and an improved credit rating, which gives you new freedom for pursuing other, larger goals.
Next, you brainstorm about the "how" of achieving this goal. You plot out all of your anticipated costs for the coming year, both the monthly ones and those that only happen once per year (e.g., insurance premiums) as close as possible to the month where each expense will be paid. The result is a list of 12 numbers representing the anticipated fixed (i.e., non-discretionary) costs each month. Ideally, the amount of money coming in each month is more than the amount going out, although there will probably be a few exceptionally expensive months. You add up the amounts you expect to have left over every month after fixed costs, and you get the total amount you have to play with over the coming year. You immediately subtract your X thousand dollar goal from this number. (Ideally the amount you have after meeting your goal is positive. If not, you brainstorm about ways to increase the money coming in or reduce fixed costs until you've got positive number after subtracting X, or you revise your goal to be more realistic.) You divide the money that's left after meeting your goal by 12 to get your monthly "discretionary" cash for the coming year. You can safely put this amount each month toward clothes, entertainment, etc. and still meet your goal.
Not only have you figured out a realistic plan for meeting this goal that is personally meaningful to you, but your plan is laid out month-by-month so you can monitor your progress as the year unfolds. As you get closer to the X thousand, your enthusiasm for meeting this goal grows, and your interest payments start going down. The process reinforces itself in your mind and you start feeling a quiet confidence that you will meet the goal by the end of the year.
That's all well and good, but why write about it on a website advertising a shareware outlining program? Outlining software can help with hierarchical projects of all kinds. Meeting this particular goal is a matter of dividing it up into monthly pieces and managing each month as its own mini-goal. Similarly, the brainstorming that you do about your costs is also a divide-and-conquer task where the small savings you find in a bunch of different areas can add up to a large savings overall. The point is that achieving large personal goals is usually a matter of finding ways of breaking them down into smaller ones and focusing on achieving those smaller goals individually. Outlining software is specifically designed to help you manage hierarchies like these. I hope you enjoy trying it out the next time you sit down to brainstorm about your own personal goals.
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