Let’s move on to step #2 of the Goal-Setting Process: list-making. Now, I can’t help but bring to mind the first step which was outlined in Goal-Setting Process for Writing & More – Step 1: Brainstorming. Feel free to review this post if you need a refresher or haven’t read it before. NOTE: in preparing today’s blog post, I did go back and make some tiny revisions to step #1’s article to make a few of the directives a little clearer.
If you participated in step #1 of this goal-setting journey, then you’ve already created a comprehensive list of goals that you would like to accomplish within the next 6 months. In brainstorming, your list should have been created with no filters. All ideas were to be welcomed and nothing was to be discarded during this initial stage of the process. You just simply needed to get ideas down on the page or computer screen.
Once your comprehensive goals list is completed, then you are to sort the list, based on the goal’s time to completion. Here are the 4 different categories:
- goals you’d like to start on immediately,
- goals you’d like to start and complete in the next 3 months,
- goals you’d like to start and complete within 3 – 6 months, and
- goals that are 6 months or more away from probable implementation.
Your one list should turn into 4. And for any goals that are outside of the 6 months, I would just table them for now and make sure to include them in the last category to be looked at at a future date when they get closer to becoming more time-sensitive. By listing these distant goals out and placing them in the last category, you provide them with a safe haven to rest at for future consideration.
REMEMBER: you’re one person. Right now, you already have a busy schedule and you’re looking to incorporate more items into an already packed schedule. So, here’s where you can take your multiple lists and whittle them down, based on whether you realistically can take on certain goals or not. For those goals that would be dream goals someday but you don’t really foresee as being something you’d accomplish in reality, chuck them altogether or list them in the “6 months or more away” category (if you’re really serious about pursuing them someday).
Lastly, rank each individual goal (by level of importance) within their respective categories. Rank them from 1 to whatever number of goals there are in the category (with “1” representing the most important goal and so on). Then, choose the top 3 goals from each of the first 3 categories (listed above). The results will be those goals that you will initially concentrate on setting and completing within the next 6 months. (As far as the goals that remain in the categories and were not the top 3, leave them right where they are. As you knock out goals higher in the ranks, the lower-ranked goals will move up to replace them, and then you can start to work on those goals as well. Hope this makes sense.) All the goals in the fourth category will also stay right where they are and will be used in this step #2 of the Goal-Setting Process again in the future.
NEXT ⇒ sometime next week, I’ll share my top 3 goals in each of the first 3 categories as well as introduce step #3 of the Goal-Setting Process.
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