Remember when I listed my goals for December? There’s one goal that I didn’t accomplish, and this left me disappointed for a while. See, no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to write 16 articles for Web Worker Daily for December. I only wrote 11.
What went wrong?
Theoretically, it was possible. I just moved some things around in my Google Calendar and thought, rather naively, that I could do 16 articles for Web Worker Daily in December.
Here’s where the problem lies: the goal was focused on the quantity of the work I wanted to produce. The goal wasn’t about “tackling more challenging issues” or “doing an interview with a mentor”. Even if I had shifted my internal priorities to produce quality work, my external perception of improvement still depended on quantity.
Notice the wording of my goals: “Write 16 articles for Web Worker Daily.” This is followed by a few paragraphs on how I plan to improve the quality of my work. Obviously that has nothing to do with the number of articles I should produce. Duh. Was that stupid or what?
What ended up happening was that as I was working on each article, I kept wanting it to be better, but this meant spending more time on improvement rather than churning out extra articles (Note: I guess how one can measure quality is another story). This made me end up 5 articles short of my “goal”.
Some lessons on goal setting:
In brief bullet points, here’s what I learned from the experience:
- Don’t set goals just because. Know the reason why you want to accomplish a goal and use that as your fuel. It’s not about crossing things off a list, it’s about committing to your passions.
- Be careful with your phrasing. Make sure it reflects what you really want to accomplish, as opposed to a simple knee-jerk statement based on old, irrelevant ways of measuring success.
- Use the calendar, don’t let it use you. I’ve also learned that using the month as my time frame tends to be too short. Based on experience, I have success with daily, weekly, quarterly, and 3-year goals. Sure, I can break up those goals into months, but some of my goals are a bit more long term than that. What really works is setting milestones and scheduling them at a realistic pace, forgetting about man-made time structures like months and years. This means I might still be in between milestones come the end of the month. It’s the tasks that come first, not the way the calendar is arranged.
That’s it then. Now it’s time for me to work on those milestones.
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