It is that time of the year….where we get to assess how we’ve done against our 2012 goals and also set some goals for 2013. It’s easy to call them new year resolutions or your annual vision or something even more grandiose than that – for now I will attempt to demystify this activity by simply calling them “Annual Goals”.
I am sure there are a number of us that are not into the habit of setting annual goals. In my own opinion, this is a very healthy habit to get into as quickly as possible. Among other things, it equips you with a compass (or a GPS for the modern day professional or a gen-Y individual!) that directs you as well as keeps you aware of how far you are from the destination. It also forces you to re-calibrate your life, re-assess where you are going and re-shape if you need to. In the worst case, it doesn’t hurt and in the best case, it can re-vitalize how you live life and your approach to things – constantly asking questions of you and possibly, causing enough of a re-think to put you in touch with your calling…..or at least put you on a trajectory that enables a journey to connect with your calling.
I have been doing this exercise over the past few years, but it has been a bit of a soft activity….only a bit better than not doing anything. It has also been an intensely private practice for me with only my closest circle of friends/family getting to know about my goals and almost nobody in full. I happened to be in a program earlier this year where there was a self discovery workshop with a broader scope. Elements of what I learnt there can go into the creation of a framework for this activity – which I would like to describe here. My goal is to make this non-fancy so one can actually do this.
I have tried to define a 4-way framework for the goal setting exercise:
1. Preparation
2. Goal categories and the goals themselves
3. Activities supporting the goals
4. Sounding board and a change management system
1. Preparation
(a) It may be too late for the year 2013 but it would be useful to get this started towards the October/November time-frame where you can start logging your thoughts/notes/observations (about things that are candidates for your annual goals) in raw format. The key is for this to remain in raw format without any judgment of whether it fits or not. I have personally gotten into the habit of keeping two notes “open” from the beginning of the year – one for Year N+1 and one for year N+2. As and when ideas bubble up, I just dump them there. But October would be an optimal time-frame to start because the context is much more current and hence much more relevant.
(b) Perhaps the most important step is the one that happens closer to the end of the year. The last 2 weeks of December are ideal – irrespective of whether you work through those 2 weeks or are vacationing. This is where you take a hard look at yourself, recall what your goals in life are, what is your calling, what gives you joy, who your stakeholders are and what are the steps that you want to take towards them during the following year. You have a nice large list to choose from already. If you force yourself to limit the number of goals to a strict number (3 ideally), you are guaranteed to cut unimportant things out of your goals and keep only the REALLY important ones.
A quick tip for those of us that may not have started on 1(a) is to get it started now and have only one goal – that of firming up your goals by the end of Jan or Feb. You are going to be skewed by 2 months for the coming year, but it doesn’t matter. This is exactly what I did when I started this routine and it worked out just fine.
2. Goal categories and the actual goals
(a) Categories – I have found it useful to have goals under 4 clear categories and it turns out, they remain relevant at all times – irrespective of where you are in your career, where you are in your life, who your key stakeholders are and so on. But it is VERY important to have no more than 3 goals under each category. The easiest thing to do is use the much-abused “AND” conjunction and pack two goals into one, but trust me, this is no more than self-fulfilling prophecy. At the time of setting goals, there’s a strong temptation to become ambitious and pack too many goals but there are two problems with that – (i) they quickly become unrealistic and you get into the habit of setting goals but not meeting them (ii) you don’t force yourself to take out the not-so-important and unimportant things….and that undermines the whole goal-setting exercise.
(b) The categories themselves – this is quite simple if you think of it. But what fits into each category changes with where you are in your life. So, the 4 categories that I would like to advocate are the following. They are very self explanatory and I would not like to blur it further by volunteering unnecessary and obvious verbiage to explain them. The only thing note-worthy is the need to keep Personal and Relationship as two separate categories. Personal can include things like learning some new skills (example music, a new sport, etc.) or routines (do meditation twice a week) or well-defined milestones (example complete a half marathon by Sept 2013). Relationship goals can be related to things like strengthening your bond with the spouse (by engaging in activities – more about this later) or reconnecting with a parent or some such.
Another key is to make sure that these goals are well thought out and clearly connect with what is important for you and your key “stake holders” – the people that matter the most to you.
(i) Personal
(ii) Professional
(iii) Relationship
(iv) Financial
PS: Your goal of staying away from your smartphone through the evening/night can belong to either the Personal section (to build your abstinence muscle as well as to avoid being interrupt-driven) or to the Relationship section
3. Activities supporting the goals
I have found that the best defined and best meant goals lose their presence on an individual’s radar screen as the year rolls along. Other interrupts and the “tyranny of today” take over. As a second-order detail of integrating your goals into your life and also making time/resource investments appropriately, it is important to firm up activities and routines that support them. Some such examples are:
Goal: Spend more time with your wife
Activities/Routines: 1 date night every month, one visit to the gym together every week
Goal: Learn to play piano
Activities/Routines: Hire a piano teacher by Feb 28, Weekly Piano class and once a week piano practice by myself
4. A Sounding Board/Change Management Team
This is a component of annual goals system that I find missing in most people’s cases …..and the one that has ailed me the most personally. It is EXTREMELY important to get this right – to have a sounding board of 5-6 people that you trust the most and who have the fortitude to hold a mirror to you. It is also important to have diversity in your sounding board – people who have seen you from various vantage pints, people who come from different walks of life and ideally, people from different generations. One strong recommendation is to have at least one spiritually oriented person in the group – someone with a philosophical bent of mind.
Having picked a sounding board, you want to seek the help of your sounding board to
(a) Review your goals with them at the time of establishing them. Remember that they are free to give you feedback on your goals, but you own the goals and you NEVER change your goals to “satisfy” them
(b) Review your goals with them on a periodic basis – no more often than once a quarter
(c) Invite them to offer suggestions/critique as and when they see fit – not just at the time of establishing the goals or at periodic-review time
(d) Set a very high bar that offers resistance to change your goals during the year. This is a bit tricky because you have two conflicting forces to contend with. On the one hand, you have the temptation to change goals to “re-calbirate” them during the year because you are either doing too well against your goals or as is most often the case, you have fallen behind. The other possibility could be that the goal has gone out of context because there have been other developments that have rendered the goal irrelevant. One simple rule of thumb here is to change your goals only in the event of life-events of the scale of a job change or marriage or arrival of a child or some such thing. A terrific finish to a year would be to not change the goals thru the year AND to meet all all of them. You always get the sense that something is lost if you’ve changed your goals along the way. So, to summarize, it is important to strike the right balance between stability and continued relevance as far as the goal-set is concerned.
Hope this helps – it definitely has helped me. I find myself living life a bit more purposefully, free of peer pressures and any such anxieties that can weigh you down and blur your vision. Having annual goals is no elixir to life’s uncertainties and confusions, but it is a good start to focussing on your pursuit and cutting out a lot of noise and clutter that are features of the information-overload-age that we live in.
I have also attached a small template (with some sample goals filled in) that I am going to use to capture and maintain my 2013 goals. Please feel free to use/enhance it.
Click to access Annual%20Goals%20Sample.pdf
Rgds
Sachin
An Amateur's Blog - Sachin Desai 