Seth Godin wrote “If you want people to embrace your version of the future, talk about it like it’s right around the corner, not on another planet.”
“For example: “We’re going to launch a new product next year” sounds a lot more distant than handing someone a prototype and saying, “this launches on January 3rd at 2 pm at CES.””
What Seth was talking about is making things concrete to get others to buy into what you’re doing. But what about your buy-in?
When you create goals for yourself and your business, have you made it sound believable and urgent to yourself? Or is it pie-in-the-sky and waaaaaaay down the road?
Even really big goals can creep up on you if you aren’t paying close attention. We need to set real deadlines for our goals to make them seem urgent. And not just the final deadline of “this launches at …”. We need to break the big goals into manageable steps and give each of these steps a concrete deadline too.
This all sounds simple but it’s not always as easy as it sounds; particularly when you are juggling multiple goals.
This week I’ve been working on my goals for this quarter. I bought six different colours of post-it notes -one for each goal. I wrote down everything I needed to do for each goal on a different post-it. I took a piece of Bristol board and divided it into 12 squares: one for each of the next 12 weeks. Then I pasted the post-its into the square it was due.
Once I was done I realized the first six weeks were jammed up with tasks, but there was nothing for the final six weeks. There were two problems. I hadn’t broken all the tasks up into small enough chunks and I was trying to get everything done at once, which isn’t possible unless I give up sleep, eating and clone myself.
One example: I want to contact 15 local groups that might need speakers. I wrote on one post-it: create a list of 15 groups and contact them. There’s no reason it all has to be done on one day. I could break this up into small chucks – say contact three groups a week for five weeks. This is a more manageable task and leaves time for other things to happen during those weeks.
So if you find your really big goals are sneaking up on you unaccomplished, check to see if you’re giving yourself deadlines that sound real to you. If they sound real and urgent, you’ll give them more attention.
Andrea J. Stenberg
