Category: Productivity

It is that time again.  Time to reflect on our achievements this year and look forward to setting goals for the coming year.  As I dictate this post, I am standing in my garage, basking in the glow of having completed a significant personal goal for 2025.  What a great sense of accomplishment! It’s a real rush! That goal was to build and install 12 cabinets in the garage.  My objective was to improve our storage efficiency and better manage clutter.   Completing this goal has given me the incentive and confidence to move on to a bigger goal for 2026.

 

Achieving goals is difficult for many.  This is especially true for personal goals, often stated as “New Year’s Resolutions.” Many who set New Year’s Resolutions at the beginning of the year abandon those goals after a few short months. That is an interesting, if not sad, phenomenon. I suspect that the same people are more successful in achieving employment-related goals. So what’s the difference between achieving personal goals and professional goals?

 

The significant difference between achieving personal and work-related goals probably lies in accountability and incentives. In a work environment, accountability is expected as people have superiors who monitor and evaluate their work.  Performance is a condition of employment. Additionally, meeting employment goals helps to ensure continued employment and improved remuneration. Secondly, goals established in a work environment usually follow the SMART method.  SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific.  SMART goals are clear, understood, and create a sense of urgency. The final component to achieving one’s goals is to put a system in place to facilitate the activities required to meet them.

 

Scott Adams, author and creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has written extensively on success. He is a firm believer that the difference between success and failure lies in the system established to achieve one’s goal. In addition to supervision and accountability in the workspace goal, achievement is supported by systems.

 

From Wikipedia: A system is a set of interacting or interrelated elements, parts, or components that work together as a unified whole to achieve a specific purpose, functioning within defined boundaries and influenced by an environment, whether concrete (like the circulatory system) or abstract (like a government or computer network). A key feature of a system is that its combined behavior produces results the individual parts can’t, relying on the connections (linkages) between its parts (nodes).

 

Keys to making and achieving your goals.

• • Use the SMART Process to ensure goals are meaningful.
  • Assemble a buddy system to support and hold each other accountable as you achieve goals.
  • Develop a System to document and employ to ensure goal attainment.

 

As mentioned earlier, I just completed a primary personal goal for 2025: building and installing twelve cabinets in my garage.  Why was this goal so important to me?  I was highly motivated to achieve this goal as we needed better organization in the garage. I viewed this goal as a great way to improve my experience and skills in preparation for 2026. I paced myself by completing one cabinet each month. My follow-on goal is to build five end tables, a coffee bar, a towel chest for the bathroom, and possibly a sofa table for the apartment we built in the basement. I set this goal because I knew it would make our garage more efficient and provide experience to achieve next year’s goal. In other words, it was a strategic goal with an efficient application.

 

Success in life is the ability to set and achieve significant goals.  I don’t know anyone who has achieved success without setting goals and making plans to achieve them.  People who fail to achieve a desired outcome either don’t know how to set goals, don’t follow a system to achieve them, or both.  The key to achieving personal goals is to follow the same process employers use to achieve business goals.  Use the SMART process to establish your goals.  Assemble a team to inject accountability and provide emotional support.  Develop a system to identify and map the processes and procedures required to attain your goal.   Plan your work, and work your plan!

 

Epilogue: Setting SMART Goals and a System for Weight Loss

First Step – Set a Smart Goal

• • Lose 30 lbs in 6 months. Approximately 1.15 lbs per week. (Specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable, and time-specific
  • Set a date and time each week to weigh in and record current weight. Recognize progress or corrections needed.

 

Build a Support Team

• • Check in with your Family Doctor and Nutritionist for guidance
  • Find a diet buddy or buddies to create a support group for recognition and continued encouragement
  • Consider a Gym membership, a Personal Trainer, or a personal exercise routine

 

Create a System

• • Consider a Digital Application to track your stats, i.e., daily caloric intake, exercise, weight loss, etc.
  • Consider what works for you and do more of that.  Offload activities that don’t appear to help you achieve success.

 

 

Jim Weber – Managing Partner,  ITB Partners

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