Good Goal Setting is About Priorities

People want to succeed in business and in life. Success is often a result of planning. But what if the items you have on the plan are wrong? This could lead you to a place in your life you didn’t expect and not for the better. Besides, it means that you have wasted your time. That’s why you need to begin your goal setting by first focusing on your priorities in life. These will be a better guide in helping you map out your success journey.

Start with your Priorities

Start by writing out everything that you feel is important in your life.  Think about what you believe to be the priorities in your life.  The items can have degrees of importance and you can put a number scale on each one to indicate which are more important than the others.

After you have listed out your important items, use the number scale to rate the items. You can choose how you want the scale to be measured, but suppose it is 1 being the lowest priority to 5 being the highest. You can do this in a spreadsheet so that you can resort after you have done this for all the items.

Sort your priorities list from highest to lowest. These select few are going to be the focal points of your goal setting. You can choose to try and include all the items on your list or you can decide to eliminate any that are below a certain number like all the items that have a priority of 1 or 2. That is up to you. But you do want to make the list as manageable and as meaningful as possible.

For each of the highest priority items, the next step is to figure out what it will take to achieve them. List out high-level mini goals (be sure to check out our blog on SMART goals) for each item. You can choose to prioritize these in much the same way, but at this stage of the process, it is not completely necessary.

The next step is to come up with more detailed tasks for the mini goals. You can go as far down as you want or you can stop at just one level. It all depends on the type of tasks you come up with. If it’s enough to be defined as a work unit, i.e., a task that you can easily perform, then you probably have gone far enough down. If the item can be broken down into further sub-tasks, then that is the next step.

By using this list-prioritization process, you have a much better chance of containing tasks that are the right ones to meet the objectives of your goals.