Goal Setting Basics

With any business, or life in general, goal setting in any shape or form is essential. How do you measure your success? Well, if you’ve set any sort of goal, you can determine this by whether you’ve completed the task(s) or hit certain measurable targets.

Having both short- and long-term goals can help keep you focused and on track. It’s not always about the destination, right? The journey is just as important (and exciting!) and Rome wasn’t built in a day. Okay, we’ll stop with the cheesy puns, but do you get our point? Having those smaller tasks outlined will also allow you to re-evaluate where you’re headed and if any adjustments should be made along the way. 

We tend to create goals in a few ways:

• Annually: what do we really want to say we accomplished this year? What scares us and will push us beyond our cozy box of comfort?
• Monthly: what do we need to ensure gets done each month to hit our scary annual goals? Are there monthly repetitive tasks that we should be doing (or outsourcing!) to help our business?
• Weekly: what NEEDS to get done each week to help move our business forward? We update this with client tasks and any other admin tasks, and that populates our week! As we near Thursday afternoon, anything that still hasn’t been completed gets prioritized so that the really important tasks don’t get carried over into the next week. There’s nothing worse than continuously revising due dates on a task!

At Avustaa, we use Asana to keep our minds organized and on track.  If you have never used a project management app and are one of those people whose desk is covered in sticky notes or pieces of paper with reminders on them, GET ONE! There are several options to choose from so you are bound to find one you’ll love. You can make checklists, share boards with your team and/or clients, and plus it’s nice to be able to check things off as you go. We add tasks into Asana’s app throughout the day, then organize them into the right places in the evening. We can’t even remember what life was like before it. Oh wait. Post-it notes, everywhere.

As much as we love long-term goals, we prefer breaking them down into smaller ones. Quarterly and annual goals can seem a bit daunting, but they’re also exciting. Being able to look back and see what’s been accomplished can be immensely rewarding, and you’ll hopefully see the proof in your business. Whether you’re measuring success by profit, growth, or even awareness, it takes smaller goals to fully achieve the larger ones.

However, as great as goal setting can be, and as important as it is, it’s also important to set realistic ones. Don’t set yourself up for failure before you’ve even begun; that’s not fair to yourself. Set goals that you know you can achieve, even if they require some hard work – you’ll get extra satisfaction from those.

Lastly, try and limit the amount of goals you set for yourself. We used to have #AllTheGoals and was of the belief that the more we had, the more successful we would be. WRONG. After a lot of self-development lately, we’ve learned that focusing in on one thing at a time is really the best option. That all of your smaller objectives lead to the accomplishment of ONE task. Not a handful. 

The best visions are big ones.

Brian Morgan & Michael Lennington, The 12-Week Year

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