Goal Setting

Long-Term Goals:

Your “Long-Terms” goals are things that will take some time to achieve. Long-term goals will need good preparation from your side, a consistent attitude to try, patience, and more time. In simple terms, tasks or targets that take over six-twelve months or more time can be categorized as long-term goals for you. Long-term goals require hard work and dedication. As a cherry on top, after achieving a long-term goal, an individual gains tremendous self-confidence.

Benefits of Long-term Goals for you:

1. Long-Term goals will never fade away once you have set it. Deep down it will always remind and motivate you.
2. Long-Term goals can become more personal to you like owning your favorite bike, buying your own home, etc.
3. Long-Term goals are good motivating factors for us.
4. Long-term goals will make you a good planner.
5. Depending upon the nature of your long-term goals, you get benefits. For instance, if buying a new home is your long-term goal, you will start saving money. You cut-down lavishness. If you like to get a specific degree, you gain benefits like knowledge, exposure, career options to choose, excellent industrial training, visit new places, become more creative, spread your wings, etc.
6. Setting and accomplishing Long-Term goals in education, finances, personal, career, business, knowledge-building, etc. can secure your life comfortably.

Examples of Long-Term Goal Financial Goal could be:

1. Save money
2. Invest in insurance that gives a good return
3. Separate Money for education
4. Save money to open my studio
5. Save Money for my start-up etc.

Examples of Long-term educations goals could be:

1. Join in this reputed B-School
2. Get a double major
3. Start my doctoral thesis work next year etc.

Takeaway:

Achieving your Long-Term goals can become milestones in your life.

Short-Term Goals:

“Short-Term goals are something that you can achieve in less-time or near future”. Short-term goals can be things you want to achieve in days, weeks, and months.

Benefits of Short-Term Goals are:

1. Short-term goals are easy to achieve.
2. It takes minimum time.
3. Accomplishing short-term goals will give the motivation to plan for long-term goals.
4. Long-term goals can be broken into short-term goals. It will make you perform better and achieve things faster.
5. Short-term goals will give quick-wins to stay driven and focused.
6. Short-term goals will help you beat procrastination.
7. Want to get genuine feedback on how you are performing? Set Short-term goals and achieve them.
8. You become a good planner by setting short-term goals.

Examples of Short-Term Goals for Start-Ups:

1. Reach more customers through social media marketing.
2. Find a good designer before the month-end.
3. Redecorate the office meeting space before this week. Etc.
4. Develop an official App before June.

Examples of Short-Term goals for College-Students:

1. Submit networking assignment by Thursday
2. Apply for the internship-program by Monday evening.
3. Pay my semester-fee before the deadline
4. Clean my room and get rid of old books
5. Get a 3.0 GPA in the coming semester
6. Finish the balance coding-snippet in the lab today itself.
7. Enroll in the new writing class etc.

Examples of Short-term goal Personal Goals could be:

1. Fix the usual dentist appointment
2. Write a journal every night.
3. Stop using gadgets before going to sleep.
4. Save money for the new watch
5. No shopping this month
6. Improve my water intake daily etc.
7. Enroll in the art class by Friday

To Conclude:

To achieve your long-term goals, you need to get good at setting short-term goals and working on achieving it.

Tip 1: Solid Study Habit – When to Study?

The first step in setting an achievable study goal is to bring a study habit. You need to allocate focused study-time. Avoid other activities during this study time. Do something productive with it. After one week of following, it can easily become a habit for you.

Tip 2: Suitable Study Technique – How to Study?

Pick a study technique that you find helpful in remembering your subjects. Ex: You can use flow-charts, note-taking, doodles, stick-notes, drawings, mind-maps, etc. to study.

Tip 3: Identify Short-term and Middle-term goals – What to Study?

Here, ‘What to study’ depends upon your short-term and middle-term goals. Know them. Write them down.

Examples Short-term & Middle-Term goals could be:

1. I want to improve my grades before mid-term
2. I need to focus on thermodynamics more
3. I need to finish my quarterly assignment-papers before this week
4. Get A+ in my Lab, etc.

It brings a precise focus for you.

Tip 4: Plan– How to Start?

Now, you have short-term and middle-term goals with you! Write steps to achieve it.

For Ex: I want to improve my grades in the coming Mid-Term

Write your Plans like:

1. What paper did I score low? Which part is getting me low-scores?
2. Spend extra study hours in the weekend
3. Take some sample online tests etc.

Setting clear process goals are important to achieve the study-goals you set.

Tip 5: Limit Distractions – What to Avoid?

Make sure no one or nothing disturbs you during your study time. Limit phone and internet distractions.

Tip 6: Consistency & Monitoring – How to Get Results?

Star executing your study-plans. Be consistent with it. Monitor your progress. Ask yourself, have you accomplished your short-term goals? Did you get what you expected?

1. Health/Fitness:

“It’s never too early or never too late to work towards being the healthiest YOU.” – Unknown

Good Health and fitness are the foundation goals for a good life. It is the ultimate factor that improves your mind, body, and soul to perform well in all your endeavors. Without good health, none works in life. Compromising your health and fitness for achieving your dream goal is also not worth it.

Bring healthy food changes. Live an active life. Get enough sleep. Maintain good hygiene. Embrace more eco-friendly options. They are all basic health goals that you and I can bring in our life.

2. Mental Health :

“Positivity always wins…Always.” – Gary Vaynerchuk

Mental health should be your topmost priority. Instead of trying to control your surroundings or blame it, shift your attitude towards positivity. Realize that you cannot please everyone. Understand that we cannot control the way people speak or behave. But we can control our thoughts, actions, and behaviors. Start training your mind to positivity. Guard yourself against negative thoughts and behaviors entering your mind.

3. Education:

“Empower yourself with Education.” – Michelle Obama

Education instills empowerment, independence, and morality in every individual. Education is the basic goal to improve your life.

4. Career:

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs

Choose the line of education that you are passionate about. Despite initial struggles with different lines of work, always end up in a career that you like. This is a basic but life-defining goal you need to focus on.

5. Social:

“The Importance of good people in life is like the importance of a heartbeat. It’s not visible but silently supports life.” – Unknown.

Earn good people in life. It’s a fundamental goal we all need to achieve.

What goals do you want to achieve for your business set-up?

Do you have financial milestones to reach? Or, do you like to achieve goals like Increase Customer-base, Logistics to remote-areas, Lowering operational-costs, Testing/launching new products, etc.

Be specific about what you want to achieve and in which area you want to achieve. This is the key to setting an achievable business goal.

Next steps will be:

1. Convey your Goals:

Make your goals public to your employees. Gather opinions. Your employees should know what their company is doing and where it is headed. Also, be descriptive in your goals so your employees will get the entire picture.

2. Necessary resources:

Starting with the budget, Human-resource, backup plans, etc. you need to gather necessary resources to meet your business goals.

3. Review your benchmarks:

It will help you in setting the next appropriate goals for your current business scenarios. Benchmarks will help redesign failure into success models, bring fresh perspectives, and workable ideas for achieving your new goals.

4. Make a road-map:

In a business setup, Road-Map is like setting up apparent process goals to achieve your ultimate goal. How you are going to reach your goal is important in the business. Road-maps will guide you with where to start and how to travel.

5. Plans:

Start working on finding workable, flexible, and achievable action plans.

6. Start executing:

By combining your action plans and road maps, optimize your resources, and get your employees on board and start. Your business goals will take the shape only when you get into action.

7. Set Deadlines:

We can see the progress of your business goals with your deadlines.

8. Rewards:

Celebrate even the little milestones you achieved from your business goals.

How to set achievable goals?

Step 1: Identity what type of Goals you have in mind

What type of goals you have in mind? Do you have goals to achieve every day or do you have monthly/weekly/yearly goals?

Ex:

1. An everyday goal can be: Drink 8 glasses of water, Walk a Mile, etc.
2. Monthly Goals can be: Earn this target money, finish one online-course, etc.
3. Weekly goals can be: complete 10 pages of assignments, finish the office presentation on financial-risks, etc.

Identifying what goals you want to accomplish is important. Only then, you can proceed further in setting achievable process goals.

Step 2: Write them down

The second step is to write all the goals you want to achieve in your journal or separate notebook. Personally, writing your goals becomes a powerful reminder for you. You can find a goal-planner notebook. Or, a simple notebook will do. You can separate it for days, weeks, and months for convenience.

Step 3: Write Process Goals

Under each goal, write down its corresponding process goals.

Ex:

Weekly Goal 1: Want to finish office-presentation on Financial Risks.

Process Goals: Collect references from financial-dept., finalize the design-layout by Wednesday, etc.

Daily Goal 1: Drink 8 Glasses of Water

Process Goals: Carry own Water-bottle, place it nearby workspace, refill during breaks without fail, etc.

Step 4: Start

Now start executing your process goals for your day, month, and weeks. You can also prioritize it according to importance and convenience.

Step 5: Measure Progress

Strikeout once you have finished the process goals. The more you complete your process goals, the closer you get to reach your ultimate goal.

Takeaway:

Set simple and clear achievable goals for yourself. Reaching your end-goal becomes stress-free. The quality of the outcome will be highly fruitful.

1. Goals give Purpose:

With purpose, an individual will easily move forward to different phases of life. For instance, Personal goals, business/work goals, financial goals, creative goals, etc. will help bring out the best of efforts in individuals.

2. Goals bring out Talents:

When we set our own-goals or when given a goal to achieve, we bring out all the talents to use and skills to experiment in achieving that goal.

3. Goals Give Determination:

Persistence, determination, and attitude to “keep trying” will come when there is a goal to achieve. Your goals will push you to learn new things.

4. You get Clarity:

A small or big goal is not an issue. What goals you intend to set will clearly show what you want in life and what you want to achieve every day.

5. Goal-Visualization is an Interesting Motivator:

Visualizing your goals, how to achieve it, what happens when we achieve it become interesting motivators for us.

6. Goals can bring back people:

People who have gone through a bad phase in life can get back on track with goal setting. Goals are psychological remedies to forget the troubles and move forward in life with a purpose.

7. Goals improve Self-Confidence:

You set goals because you know you can achieve it or at least try to see what happens. It is because of your self-confidence. But a ‘not-so-confident’ people will hesitate to set a goal and pursue it vigorously.

8. Goal setting improves Brain Function:

Even if it is a small goal, when you set it and finish it, your brain releases Dopamine, the Happy Hormones. This dopamine enhances positivity, keeps you motivated and content. With dopamine, you feel good physically too.

Set a goal. Achieve it and see your mind and body becoming highly positive.

“Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal.” — Brian Adams

What is Process Goals?

You need to set process goals to achieve larger and actual goals you have in mind successfully. The logic is, if there is a methodical process, reaching a goal becomes easy despite all distractions that come your way. An important aspect of goal setting is to define and set procedural/process goals.

Examples of Process Goals:

1. If “writing 5000 words in 15 days are your larger and actual goal, your process goals should be “write 300 Words every day”.
2. If “Increasing your grades” is the larger goal you have, set process goals like “spend 1 Hr. for study and 30 Minutes for revision/self-test” every day in the early morning hours.
3. If your goal is to “Become a positive Person”, then your process goals here would be something like “I’ll think of three things I’m grateful for every night”, “try to help someone every day”, “I will lessen my anger every day” etc.
4. If your goal is to start your own business, your process goals should be “study successful business-model every week”, “see what the other people in your area are offering”, “enhancing your business skill” etc.

By creating a process goal, it will incline you to do the activity based on a condition-mindset without procrastinating. But, if you just have a goal to achieve, various reasons can easily distract you.

Why I should Develop Process Goals?

1. Having a goal is not enough. Same way, focusing on the end goal is also not enough. So what do we need? You need to focus on designing your process goals.
2. By setting process goals, you get a chance to celebrate even small success to gain further motivation.
3. Process goals are the logical ways to achieve the target goals you have in life and to handle everyday goals.

“Write your goals down in detail and read your list of goals every day. Some goals may entail a list of shorter goals. Losing a lot of weight, for example, should include mini-goals, such as 10-pound milestones. This will keep your subconscious mind focused on what you want step by step.” — Jack Canfield

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” —Confucius

“Most ‘impossible’ goals can be met simply by breaking them down into bite-size chunks, writing them down, believing them, and then going full speed ahead as if they were routine.” — Don Lancaster