Conquering the Creative Work-Life Balance: Goal-Setting Steps 1 and 2

How have your creative work-life balance brainstorming sessions been going? Oh, and please don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. At the time of the distribution of this blog post, I’ve given you a couple of weeks now to pour out your list of to-dos on your computer (or on as many pieces of paper needed to do the job). So, no excuses allowed.

Unless . . . of course, you truly don’t have any idea what I’m typing about here. And in that case, I’ll give you a pass for not being prepared today. But here’s what I’d like for you to do. I’d like for you to read through the creative work-life balance discussions and catch up as best you can. You can find those discussions below:

Conquering the Creative Work-Life Balance

Conquering the Creative Work-Life Balance: Simplifying Things

Conquering the Creative Work-Life Balance: Focusing on the Big 3

Conquering the Creative Work-Life Balance: Goal Setting with The Project Planner

No man or woman left behind. I need YOUR company on this important mission. And therefore, I want those just hopping on the goal-setting train to have a productive ride just like those of you who’ve been with this process from the beginning. But what I will say is that I can’t slow down progress. I’ve got to move forward because I want to keep the momentum for this process flowing (or our progress train a-chuggin’, so to speak).

Okay. Enough of the preliminaries, my friends. Let’s get going on the continuation of our creative work-life balance activities. Shall we?

Let’s backtrack to Step #1 in our process. In brainstorming, your personal and professional goals list of to-dos 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. In other words, all goals that you would like to accomplish in your foreseeable future should be included on your goals list.

No goal is too big and no goal is too small to include. Whatever your visionary heart can think of is perfect for listing during your brainstorming sessions.

I know it took me multiple sessions to get everything out; and if that’s your experience, welcome to the club. As a matter of fact, even after we go through the goal-setting process before us, you might find that some of the goals (you’re in the process of working on) might need to be tweaked slightly to fit your life’s circumstances. And that’s mighty alrighty. Just try to stay on course the best you can and continue to strive for goal progress even if it has to slow down and make room for life happenings.

Now, let’s go back to our brainstorming and what to do afterwards. After brainstorming, we have a phase in the process that I like to call “finessing the list(s)”. So, a lot of list making was going on in our first step with the brainstorming; but now in Step #2, we’re going to be all about getting our goals lists in working order. Literally . . . in working order. In other words, what we do in Step #2 determines the literal goals work we’ll actively participate in going forward.

Therefore, Step #2 will be officially known as “List-Making” going forward. And this is the step where we’re going to sort out the goals we intend to work on for the next month to 3 months. NOTE: I, personally, prefer to go month-by-month when looking ahead, because so much can change in the course of a month (or week even). So, I choose not to work too far ahead when setting my goals. On the occasions I tried to plan past a month out, I had to revamp my whole goals lists way too many times. But, that’s just me.)

For others, working on a quarterly basis (looking at 3 months at a time) works for them. If that’s you, I say — DO YOU. (It’s too bad I didn’t get us geared up to either start this process first part of January or wait until right before April’s entrance so we could be at the start of a calendar quarter, but that’s okay. I’m getting going on this now, and getting going on goals is good anytime. (Hey, that was pretty smooth with the whole tongue twister I just typed out.) Try saying getting going on goals is good (out loud) about 10 times and see where you end up. Hee. Hee.

Anyway, in the list-making phase, we’re going to sort the comprehensive list from our brainstorming sessions into 4 different categories (based on time to goal completion). The 4 categories are as follows:

• goals you’d like to start on immediately,
• goals you’d like to start and complete in the next month,
• goals you’d like to start and complete within 1 – 3 months, and
• goals that are more than 3 months away from probable implementation.

Ultimately, your one comprehensive list (from the brainstorming) should turn into 4. And these 4 categories of goal sorting were created to help us view the order of importance our goals will assume and the plan of attack for achieving those goals.

Now, I don’t want you to delete out any goals, because they were important enough for you to list them in the first place. So, keep them on your list (even if they don’t seem realistically doable until sometime waaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy into the future). Remember: the brainstorming sessions were to get all the goal to-dos out of that head of yours and recorded for master manipulating as our process goes on — again, no matter how big or how small the goal appears to be.

And now, we’re taking the process one step further and sorting our goals list, according to the timeframes in which we envision each goal can be accomplished (knowing all roles, responsibilities, and expectations we currently have going on in our lives or are soon-to-come).

Well, I think I’ve come to the end of my spiel for today. We have plenty to work on here, especially those who are working to catch up. We’re making progress though. And just to give you some insight before I go, I want you to know that I’m not going to ask you to do something I’m not doing myself. As a matter of fact, I’ve actually already been utilizing this process in my own goal-setting monthly endeavors. And, it’s helping keep me on track better than I could ever do without it.

I hope you come to find these steps helpful to your goal-setting process as well.