Sometimes goals fall through shortly after the first few months, if not earlier. You start the year with good intentions, you even set some decent goals and apply well-known frameworks. But then, life took over? You got busy doing stuff and jumped back on the hamster as fast as you can say goal-setting. What happens then? How to stay on track with your goals?
The lull in the goals
It is not uncommon to have a time in the year when you look back, and potentially you have trouble remembering what your goals were. Or perhaps why you even had them in the first place. In reality, that is a sign of overwhelm, rather than a sign of bad goal-setting, so let’s say, for the sake of argument, your goals are still valid.
It is not uncommon for goals to lose their strength during the year. After all, it is hard to keep an eye on the long game when the short-term challenges need immediate action. When that happens, it is probably helpful to remember that this happens to the most common of mortals.
It is not a sign of failure or even of the quality of your original purpose. It is just a sign of life.
As the year gets going and the first quarter has flown by, with more things on your to-do list than you had started the year with, it is not a surprise to not even cope with the thought of looking at the original list. It is a bit scary, really. And if we feel we are making progress in some places anyway, why bother looking at it? We are doing just fine.
The second-guessing
Amidst the adrenaline of getting things done, it is easy to second-guess the original thoughts and ideas. Can’t we just assume we had no idea of what was going to happen when the year first started, and therefore we are better off just course-correcting and finding some new targets?
Whilst I am fully supportive of reviewing goals along the way, I daresay I would rarely expect them to be completely dumped after just a quarter.
Just because we could not get to them, it does not mean they are suddenly rendered unimportant.
It is indeed hard to break the automatic rhythm that we often get into. As we make our way through to-do lists and quickly break that original energy that the beginning of a year can bring, time just seems to fly by. In a blink, the first quarter is upon us, and we can’t even remember what it was that we said we were going to do. Leading us to the assumption that it probably was wrong to start with. But was it?
Getting ahead
In my experience, taking time to sit down, analyse the prior year and make a plan for the year ahead is more often than not the best way in which to decide where the focus of a business should be. So why do those plans fail so easily? The devil is in the detail, or so to speak, the execution. A key part of my goal-setting process is to establish defined practical activities for each goal.
That means we translate the goals and milestones into what they mean in our daily lives.
Ideally, we even schedule some of those steps into our calendars. That is getting ahead of the frenzy that happens when we put down pen and paper from “strategising” and go back to work.
By getting ahead, we create the habits and routines that will allow us to stay the course, even when life gets taken over by emergencies, new demands or just the usual juggling act. It will also be the fastest way to evaluate our goals each month and each quarter. We can find all types of excuses for our metrics not to be on track, but we can’t hide from the fact that we are not doing what we said we were going to do.
Check Yourself. Twice.
Rather than stopping at the first check and just assuming your goals just need to be revised as they are no longer in keeping with what you are doing, I would take this a step further. Sit down with your original plan, even if for 30 minutes and make a list. What did you actually DO to advance these areas of work? Sales, product development, hiring, and fundraising. If you did do some of the activities, you can then move to think of why they may not be working and course-correct. If you did not do the activities, then what is the next quick win you can work on to get you back on track?
It’s not about a checklist, but rather more of a prompt list. At a time when we speak so much about prompts, perhaps we also need to work on prompting ourselves to think twice and give a response better than “I don’t have time!” We have context, but are we optimising for speed or for the accuracy of the outcome?
I am not here to tell you I have done perfect monthly goal-setting checks through the first quarter. I have done a few weekly check-ins, a new experiment I am working on, and I have done a few monthly check-ins. My quarter-end review is now in the pipeline, as I try to get my head around April being almost done. I know I am getting anxious about it not being done, as time has taught me that it is an excellent use of an hour to analyse, course correct and plan for the next quarter.
When are you doing your quarterly review – a 30-minute check-in?