Are You Setting The Right Goals?
You’ve read a lot about setting SMART goals, which is the process of ensuring that the goals you set can be met through creating step by step tasks that are easy to track and measure. But how do you know you’re setting the right goals in the first place?
It’s all about priorities. Understanding what is the most important for you based on your overall mission, as well as having a thorough grasp of your principles, morals, and values and how it all works together is necessary.
Know and Identify Your Priorities
One way to identify priorities is to use a priority matrix. This is simply a square that is marked out in four quadrants. The first quadrant is marked “urgent and important,” and the second is “not urgent and important,” and the third is urgent and not important and the fourth is not urgent or important.
Another way to determine the importance of a priority is to go by chronology. For example, your taxes have specific dates to be filed, so they’re easy to order. If you’re doing a TED talk next week, that’s another easy-to-understand priority.
Set Goals Based on These Priorities
Once you’ve established your priorities in your mind and reassured yourself that these priorities don’t interfere with anything else you want to do, you can start the entire SMART(ER) goal-setting process for each of the goals you have in mind. Since you already believe them to be priorities, this will take care of itself.
Match Your Actions and Tasks to The Priorities
List all the tasks that you need to do in a logical order, and then you can assign how this task will be done. For example, for any given task, you may complete it now, complete it later, assign it to someone else, automate it, or delete it entirely from your list because you’ve determined it’s unnecessary.
Once you know what tasks you’re going to do, you can easily look at your schedule each day and see clearly what you need to do. It’s the best way to establish routines that ensure you get the most impactful tasks done each day by considering which goals you really want to set before you start based on priorities
