Dianne WhitfordWelcome back! In this second post about goals, we will explore how to set goals that are meaningful, actionable, and time based. We will also look at a process for developing the short term goals and tasks that get you to those overall goals, and how to refine your list so you’re focusing on the right things and not getting overwhelmed by how many goals you have.
This is the second step in the Goals series. If you haven’t read through the first step, How to Create Your Mission Statement, head over and take a peek! You can still do this step if you didn’t follow that guide. However, I will reference stuff we did there, here!
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Goal Types
I like to classify goals into four main types.
- High Level or Long Term Goals: These are your “super goals” or your longer term goals. They should directly support your personal mission statement, and will not typically change for a long period of time – as in, years and years, or even a lifetime.
- Mid-Level or Mid-Term Goals: These are what I think of as “interim” goals – the goals that get me further along the path to my long term goals. Since these support my long term goals, they also support my mission statement. They will typically last for several years.
- Low-Level, or Short-Term Goals: These are the goals that I think will get me further along my mid-level goals. While I don’t want to give up on my mid-level goals, I am happy to swap out low level goals that aren’t getting me where I want or have turned into a dead-end. These goals should be short term (like a couple months).
- Task-type goals: These are my “checklist” kind of goals, or tasks, that need to be done in order to accomplish those short term goals on my way to my mid-level goals. These are things I can easily “check off” my list as complete, or shift gears and drop them for something else that will work better.
Goal Hierarchy
All of these types of goals work together to make a goal hierarchy. If you’ve read the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance [affiliate link] by Angela Duckworth, the idea of a goal hierarchy is probably familiar to you. The idea is that your high level goals live at the top of the hierarchy, with branches going further down into your mid- and low-level goals. The main thing is that all your goals are in alignment with your overall purpose or mission statement. The reverse is also true: you do not have goals or objectives that are not in line with your personal mission statement.
My example
As I talked about when we built a mission statement, creating a healthy lifestyle is one of the things that I find purpose in. My first mid-level goal in support of that element is to lose weight. If you follow my personal blog, you’ll know that I’m in week 15 (and 33 pounds down!) at the time of this writing, and I have a whole set of goals around my super goal of losing weight. It looks like this:
| High Level Goal | Create a Healthy Lifestyle |
| Mid-Level Goal | Lose 126 pounds by 6/15/2020 |
| Low-Level Goal | Lose 18 pounds every 2 months |
| Task-Level Goals |
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The idea is, I start by defining “what’s something I can do that gets me closer to my high level goal?”. Then break that goal down into something manageable. Then, I break down the low-level goals into individual tasks that done together, will move me along my path.
Another thing you’ll notice about the example above is that it is SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely (or, as I prefer to think of it) Time-Based.
SMART goals are referenced all the time in the corporate world, but you can make it work for you too! We’ll look at that in this post.
Get Set Up
This will work best if you have a meaningful mission statement that works for you. You don’t have to have gotten it from my exercise, it just needs to be something you believe in, that speaks strongly to you, and emphasizes those things you want to devote your time and attention to.
If you did do the mission statement exercise, grab your brain dump list. If you didn’t, you can either do it now, or take 30 minutes or so to make a laundry list of all the goals you’re working on. Make it comprehensive! Include even those items that you haven’t made progress on or plan to start.
Next, figure out how you want to plot your goals. I used OneNote to create a table since I wasn’t sure how wide or deep my hierarchy would get. Here’s what my table ended up looking like. I pasted my mission statement, or North Star, at the top to keep me focused.
Add Your High Level Goals
There’s a few different ways to do this, but what worked best for me was to pull out my themes from my brain dump list and put them in as high level goals. These are the things I want to focus on for the rest of my life. I made them a little more specific for this purpose.
To refresh, those were:
- Healthy Lifestyle
- Happy Home and Social Life
- Support My Family
- Create Beautiful, Useful Things
- Teach and Inspire Others
I added those to the High Level column, leaving blanks in between so that I could fill in my mid- and low-level goals. It looked like this:
If you didn’t do the mission statement exercise, spend some time thinking about your mission statement and 4-5 high level goals that support that statement. You want to limit yourself to 4-5 because you will see that pretty soon, your list will become unmanageable if you have too much.
Add Your Remaining Goals
Remember all those goals from your brain dump or laundry list? Here’s where you will add them. Keep this in mind as you do it:
- Is this something that supports one of my high level goals? If not, don’t add it.
- Does this get me further along to something else? If so, it’s either a mid-level, low level, or task.
- Is this a daily habit? If so, it’s probably a task, because you’re doing it for some purpose that (hopefully) relates to one of your higher level goals.
As you do this, you may think of more things to add to your list. That’s great! The thing you want to notice is how many things in your list don’t relate to one of your high level goals. Again, don’t try to jam it in just to find a place to put it. Really think about why you’re doing it and if it really does, truly, support your high level goal or not.
My example
When I got done with this step, here’s how it looked. I saw a lot of holes where I had a high level goal and maybe a mid level goal but no low level goals or tasks to support it. What that means is that those items either aren’t priority enough for me to work on right now, or they are things I need to create a path to achieve them. So, I set to work refining.
Refine
Here’s where you want to look critically at your list. Is there stuff on here that you don’t have time for? Are there things you want to move forward for which you don’t have any low level goals or tasks? Where are the holes in your plan?
Now you want to define those steps. For each of your mid-level goals, make sure you have some low level goals that get you to that goal.
Remember, you can’t work on everything at once. You don’t have to list every low-level goal required to get you your mid-level goal. For example, I have a mid-level goal for having a welcoming home, and right now my only low-level goal for that is to keep it clean. This is something I struggle with and is the most important thing to me right now, so that’s what I have in my goal list rather than all the things I can think of that would get me to my goal of having a welcoming home.
My example
Here’s another example from my list. I had “Make money off blogs”, but no low level goals to support it. How would I make money off blogs? For sure, if I didn’t have any tasks or low level goals I could take action on, it would be nothing but a wish.
I had to do some research around the best way to make money off blogs. What I realized is that I needed to monetize, create more content, and get an audience, so I added those as low level goals. Then I asked myself, HOW will I do those things? First, I needed to create content. And because I have a mission to make things that are beautiful and useful, I needed to make sure the content I was creating was something I was passionate about, was well-crafted, and that helped people. Therefore, I needed to make a content plan so I could be organized and methodical about what I created, and when. Then I needed to set time aside to create the content.
So those steps to get me further along my goal went into my task/short term goals for that item. Now I can use those as a guide for my daily to-dos or weekly/monthly goals. When they are complete, I check them off and add more short term goals that will continue my forward progress.
I also noticed that one of my items, “Write a book” was something I was interested in, but in a very vague way. I couldn’t think of ways that I could move that forward right now given my other priorities and projects I have going. So I will keep it on the back burner and revisit it for a while to see if I’m feeling the need to work on it, and if not, out it will go.
Try it! For an example, here’s how mine turned out.
Handling the Fallout
Remember when I said that if the goal doesn’t fit in your high level goals, don’t add it?
Now is when you want to look at those items. These are goals that you may either want to do or think you should be doing, but they don’t align with your life goals.
It can be really hard to let these go. Sometimes these are goals we feel obligated to have. Or we really like the picture they paint of who we would be if we accomplished them. But the fact is that working towards a goal that is not something you’re passionate about has a very low likelihood of success. We just accomplish more when we are invested emotionally and are passionate about the outcome.
So consider each of these goals carefully, and then see if you can let them go. If you can’t, do the “why exercise” to figure out why that goal is important to you. Maybe there’s a life goal you’re missing, or you need to swap a set of goals for something more important.
If you need a refresher on the “why exercise”, check out the mission statement post.
What’s Next?
Having a bunch of goals is no good if they’re not well defined so that you can track them! So head on over to the next post to get some tips on ways to do just that.
How did you experience this exercise? Was it helpful? Are there other strategies you have tried that have worked well? Please share in comments!
Heather Abbe
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