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Posted: Wednesday, November 25, 2009
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 meaningful 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 want. 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.
David Allen has plenty 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. Obviously 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 thorough, systematic approach for setting and achieving personal goals. I really recommend the book if you want to find out more about this process.
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.
