When Do I want to Get There?
In our last blog, we looked at goal setting, i.e. the direction you want to go (you can read the blog here). Obviously, one vital element of goal setting is establishing exactly when you want to arrive. The goal achievement guru Brian Tracey said that “there are no unreasonable goals, only unreasonable deadlines”. In this blog, we’re going to look at how you set reasonable deadlines.
The world is filled with people who set goals loosely and abandon them at the first sight of an obstacle, and generally the first obstacle they face is unreasonable deadlines. These people did not understand what a realistic goal timescale is.
I frequently meet people who tell me they are going to make a million pounds/dollars/euros in a specific time scale. As a result of their unrealistic goal timescale, they often overextend themselves financially and timewise. This leads to them abandoning their goal. If only they’d taken the time to think about their timescales they’d have a far greater chance of achieving their goal.
So how do you establish exactly when you want to get there?
The first thing to know is that your mind needs a timescale. In addition to having a specific goal, your subconscious mind needs a timescale to help you achieve that goal. You need to put an end date to achieve your goal by. This end date is important as it focuses your mind and the things you need to do day to day to reach your goal destination.
However not all timescales are equal, there is a fundamental problem with most goal-setting programmes in that they focus on timescales such as 12 months or 5 years. These are ok for top-level goals but not much use for actually achieving anything. How many times have you set yourself a 12-month timescale only to get to month 10 and realise that you’ve not done anything towards achieving the goal, becoming overwhelmed and then abandoning it? This is because the initial time scale seemed a long way off and therefore had no element of urgency attached to it.
So what’s the answer?
The answer for most people is ‘chunking down’, just like you were taught at school to break problems down into smaller pieces, it’s the same with large goals. Breaking them down into smaller chunks allows you to set timescales and make them more manageable.
You can apply this principle both forward and backwards to help in setting your timescales. So for example using a forward timescale setting you would start by setting the ‘big goal’ and then chunk it down into smaller pieces.
Let’s say we have a goal to have an additional 1000 customers for our new product. We can now chunk this down to 100 new customers for this product every 3 months. It’s relatively simple to add all the chunks up to set a timescale for the goal of 1000 new customers.
I.e. 3 months for 100 customers x 10 to get 1000 customers = 30 months or 2 ½ years.
Of course, we could now say “well that is not quick enough”, so do we need to add additional resources to achieve this quicker, or even we’ll get better as we go along and be able to add new customers quicker, therefore we’ll look to add 200 customers every 3 months after the first year, meaning the new timescale would be 1 year and 9 months.
So thinking about how long it will take to do each small chunk of the large goal will give you an insight into the average amount of time it will take for you to achieve your goal. We say average time because your journey will be affected by both good luck, disasters, betrayals, friendly leg ups, motivational ups and downs and impatience.
The reverse way of using this chunking method is to set both the big goal and the timescale and then work backwards. In our example earlier we might now say that we need 1000 new customers for this new product within 2 years (actually I would use an exact date rather than ‘within’ but I’m stating it this way to make this article timeless). This would allow us to break down the goal into chunks, so 2 years = 24 months or 8 periods of 3 months. We now have a goal that is focused on getting 125 new customers every three months. This is far less daunting than just saying we have a goal of 1000 new customers in two years.
So to sum up:-
Forward micro goal setting is setting micro-goals that add up to a larger goal and Reverse goal setting is breaking a larger goal down into smaller chunks.
I use a specific 90-day planning process for achieving goals. 90 days is the ideal time frame to focus on a micro goal. You all know the feeling of being excited about something new. I even break these down into 30-day sprints meaning that I’m pretty much focused on achieving my goals all the time. With my 90-day planning and goal achieving process you’re focused and dedicated and those feelings translate into working hard. Hard work inevitably builds momentum and brings the desired growth.
After 90 days have passed, you’ve probably run into some roadblocks, your micro-goals might need tweaking. You generally start to lose focus and enthusiasm and get frustrated when growth slows down.
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