Goal Stetting: My Story

My Story
I was first introduced to goal setting in March 2004. At the time I was working in a sales job, barely scraping together enough commission to earn £15k a year. I was living in a one room bed-sit, hundreds of miles away from my wife. Our house, which I only got back to some weekends, was small - barely big enough for the two of us let alone for a family that we had been trying for years to start. And I had a beaten up car that was repeatedly broken into because the bed-sit was in such a poor part of town.

Worse still I thought I was doing OK.

A friend of mine recommended I try a tape set, part of which included a section on goal setting. I listened to what was said and with a good deal of scepticism humoured my friend (and the speaker on the tapes) and sat down to write out a series of goals.

Bearing in mind my situation I wrote down the following goals to accomplish in 2004: -

• I want to earn £30k
• I want a BMW z4
• I want to be able to live with my wife on a daily basis again
• I want to start a family
• I want to buy a new house with enough space to be comfortable

Some of you will be looking at those goals and be thinking, “outrageous how can you go from your current situation to achieve these goals in just one year!” Well all the advice I had received about goal setting was think big goals. But what I find interesting looking back on things a year later is what I have actually accomplished over that year: -

• My current salaried income is over £50k
• I didn’t get a BMW z4 – I decided to get a more practical 5 series sport (about £5k more than the z4)
• I now live back with my wife in a house that is about twice as big as the old one in a better area
• We had our first child in September 2005

For every goal I set, I met or exceed the benchmark. Not only that but, with the exception of our first child they were all achieved in about half the time I had set myself.

Far fetched? It may seem so for those not familiar with the power of goal setting, but to those who know and use its power these kind of results are commonplace.

Close friends and relatives have been astounded by the changes in me over the last year. They like to put it down to luck – being in the right place at the right time.

Living by a code of conduct

Living by a code of conduct.

The other day I was at the office when a call got put through to my desk. It was a call from one of our suppliers – a girl who had been chasing me for a couple of weeks about a new feature in their software. Frankly I had no interest in the new feature and was ready to make another excuse not to take the call.

But then I thought to myself “Hang on, you make sales calls for a living. How would it make you feel if this happened to you?” And then I remembered something from the past about a code of conduct I created for myself. One of the primary points was: -

· Make someone’s day, don’t break someone’s day

If I didn’t take this call would I be living by my code of conduct? No is the answer – so I took the call.

Another point on the code of conduct was: -

· Inject humour into my day at every opportunity

So I have here a girl chasing me about a feature of the software I wasn’t really interested in. “How can I make her laugh so hard it makes her whole afternoon?” I won’t go into the details but lets just say that my willingness to be playful and ability to slip ‘double entendres’ into almost any sentence – made her day! Even though she didn’t come away with the result she wanted she thanked me for the enjoyable conversation. And it brightened up my day too, I had fun, I felt alive! And I went back to the task I was doing with renewed vigour.

But it got me thinking about my code of conduct again. For me the code of conduct defines you as a person. It sets how you will act or your default behaviour for situations and can help you enormously when making decisions. I also find it useful to focus on when you in difficult or tiresome situations.

My code of conduct is as follows: -

· Inject humour into my day at every opportunity

· Always ask the questions; Where can I add value? And How can I add value

· Smile at anyone who makes eye contact with you

· Make someone’s day, don’t break someone’s day

· Never waste a moment

· Never be afraid to ask a question

· Question everything

· Try to think out of the box

· Make every day a school day

It’s a simple task that should take less than an hour, but here’s the kicker – EVERONE HAS ALREADY DONE THIS AT A SUBCONSCIOUS LEVEL.

By taking the time to look at your code that you have and consciously focusing on whether the code is helping you or hindering you, you can take out the points that don’t work for you and install new points that will help you.

From now on I will be looking at my code of conduct every morning before I start the day. And living by it.

So, take the time out to create your own code of conduct and if you live by yours I can promise you, you will feel alive too.

Well formed Tasks

A Task is not a well formed task until it has these elements.

We have all done it haven’t we. Most of us have so much going on in our lives that we wish there were a few extra hours in the day so we could fit in everything. You may have tried traditional to-do lists and time planning systems but given up on them weeks or even days later because they were to complex or to cumbersome or you spent more time filling them in than actually doing stuff. I have tried many systems – none worked so I sat down to create my own, a kind of hybrid of all the other systems I learnt plus a few insights of my own to help me out in my own unique situation.

What I think I have come up with is, is a flexible, robust system that GETS THINGS done – rather than something you give up on down the line because it just didn’t work for you. I have outlined some of the elements in my free Blog in the hope that some of the stuff I share will go on to help other people.

Before I start I just want to define what I believe a task to be. For me, a task is not just or not even an item on a ‘to-do’ list it’s much more than that. Tasks are the main unit of my time planning solution so I will start here and we can build around this core. By following this system you will be looking at much larger chunks of information than perhaps you are used to. It might seem difficult at first but that because you are not used to working like this, stick with it and I promise it will make things FAR simpler. [More on Chunking later]

When ever I create a task in my planner it must contain the following three elements which I remember by the three letter acronym RRN. Here is what RRN stands for: -

Result: First and foremost you want to know what you get from this task. Kind of like a goal description or traditional to do item title. But not only that you have to define the metrics by which you consider the task to be completed as a success or a failure. BUT this is not just a title like “go shopping” it’s more describing what you want to get from that “go shopping” experience.

To explain, you don’t want to “go shopping” – you want to “Ensure there is enough food in the house to feed yourself and your family for the next week” Why? Well further down the planning process a result like “go shopping would leave you with no option – to complete successfully you must go shopping. But “but ensuring there is enough food…” Leaves you with options and creative solutions if time is tight. For instance have you tried home delivery, leveraging the task to another family member, or eating out for the week! So accurately describing your result – and the measure of that result, rather than a to-do item title like “go shopping can potentially turn a 90min or more task into a less than 5min task! Almost a 95% saving! Can you see were I am coming from?

Reasons: Why do you want to do this task? What will it get you? How will it help you in you categories of life [More on Categories later]. The reasons are the driving force behind the result, a bit like the big picture. It gives you a compelling reason to go out and take action.

Look if you have an item on your to-do that just sits there as a bland “change light bulb” or “make an appointment for haircut” then that are not tasks, they are just one niggling line items among dozens of other niggling line items to get done. If there are no reasons then your to-do’s become just a pain in the back side. And I’m willing to bet that unless you are one of those people who take great joy in ‘crossing things off’ they won’t get done.

And if you are one of those people that take joy in ‘crossing things off’ then you have a reason – to cross it off – but very often the quality of completion suffers because your reason is to cross it of your list, not to finish the job to a high standard.

No, YOU HAVE to give reasons for why you MUST get this task finished. It is the main energy and motivation to get things done. Now do you start to see why to-do lists seldom work?

Next Action: Now, this is where the rubber meets the road. List here in order all the individual traditional to do line items you need to do in order to complete the task. For a simple task there might only be one line item for instance in our “go shopping” example “Go Shopping” might be the only Next Action you need. However, if the task is more complicated such as create and send the proposal for Widget ltd. Then you may have a few next actions such as: -

· Gather pricing information from John in marketing

· Write proposal

· Get sign off from Ted your boss

· Email proposal to Lucy Turner at Widget Ltd

Making sure you put them in the correct sequence of events in order to get the task complete. Here is the kicker though – NEVER REVIEW YOUR LINE ITEMS WITHOUT FIRST LOOKING AT YOU RESULTS AND YOUR REASONS. Or else you are again staring at a bunch of to-do items and we all know where that will get you.

And that in a nutshell is my definition of a task. First of all you ‘chunk the to-do into a task. You describe the result you want. You describe why you want that result. Then you itemise and sequence what needs to be done in order to successfully complete the task. Also note that I haven’t yet put any time constraints on the task. I will do this when I start to plan and schedule my time.

Again, it may seem complex at first but believe me once you get going you find it incredibly powerful. And it’s a bit like learning to drive. It might seem as tough you will never master gears and steering at first – but when you persevere, something clicks and it just comes naturally.

Example Task

Below is an example of a real life well formed task that I created to get this blog entry complete. It took me less than a minute to complete.

Create First post for my compound improvement blog.

Result:

Create a brilliant post to kick off the time management series with in the compound improvement blog.

Reasons:

· Want to get started on my compound improvement blog.

· Want to get momentum going by just starting the writing process and not worrying if it is perfect

· Want to write about a useful subject that brings traffic to the site.

Next Actions:

· Review planning tools to make sure I am up to speed

· Mind map the structure of the post

· Write the post

· Publish the post to the compound improvement site.