When I was back in corporate life on large scale technology projects we were always setting deadlines, putting together schedules, analysing our schedule and budget performance and above all trying to meet our commitments to our customers and our executive management and make a profit. There were many challenges, uncertainties, and pressure on everyone to develop what was new and high risk technology yet keep the significant costs under control. Unless you have been on at least one large new technology project you may not realise just how complex they really are; fun certainly, otherwise people like myself wouldn’t do them, but complex and high risk most certainly.
Part of the process of building such systems among many many techniques is to set good deadlines and goals that keep everyone striving to move closer and closer to the finish line no matter how hard it keeps trying to run away from you. (Have you ever seen 400 engineers running down the road chasing a fast escaping deadline – not a pretty sight at all J)
Just about everyone knows they have to set goals and a well known guideline is the SMART acronym, you may have heard of it. If you hunt around on the internet you will find some different variations on the SMART theme but here are my thoughts.
To achieve your goals, big or small, personal or business, they need to be SMART:
S is for Specific. You must state exactly what you want to achieve and the target date when you wish to achieve it. The how is another matter at the early stages of your goal but comes soon after that is for sure. You may just want to get fit, or lose weight or run faster or make twice as much income next year or hit a deadline or double your profits. Well you should still write that down even though you may not know to start with how you are going to achieve it. Just get the goal written down, and rewrite it every day if you need to until it is locked into your head. For your small internet business maybe your goal might be double your traffic in 3 months, or to double your web offerings in 3 months, or to increase your click through rates (CTR) by 50%. There are many things you could choose. I will write more on good metrics in another post.
M is for Measurable. There is an old saying and a good one – “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. In other words, and this is important: “Things that are measured get improved”. Therefore, you must set goals that can be measured in some way, in a specific and objective way so that you can’t fool yourself. If you fool yourself by not using hard objective measures, you are asking for trouble. It is a bit like driving a car on a long journey and ignoring the signposts along the way – you end up lost, and probably out of fuel! If you really want to achieve something, you need to measure your progress along the way so you know if you are still travelling in the right direction, and know when you get there.
You should measure each step, and each major achievement along the way to your goal. Like driving from one side of the country to the other. You measure off each town, city, state along the way until you get to your destination, your goal. Related to this is a whole topic of what to measure, because measuring the wrong thing can mean to focus your efforts in the wrong area, which will divert you from your goals. An example, is someone who tries to lose weight and just measures their weight but not their percentage fat and water content. Maybe, they lose some weight, but maybe they lose too much muscle mass as well which won’t help them. Or driving on a long journey but only measuring the miles driven and not the cities you have gone through – sounds obvious and in that example it is, but in business it isn’t always so obvious what measures you should choose. Think carefully about what you should measure, it is important. For Internet Business is your Alexa rank really that important to you? Yes, it is easy to measure, and it is good to have a high rank, but do you really care? Is it directly important to your business? Some small sites (one page) with very low rankings make very good profits, and some sites with high rankings make no profit. Don’t get caught up wasting energy chasing the wrong measure of success only to find, achieving it didn’t give you what you were really after. I will write more on this topic another time.
A is for Attainable or Achievable. You have to dream, to aim for the stars, to try to set new standards yes, but you have to be realistic too. There is no point setting a goal if you can never ever achieve it, and if you do that in a team environment you will lose your team’s respect. The challenge is to balance realism with setting what some call “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” or “Thinking Big” or “Stretch Goals”. There is something strange about the way our psychology works and I am not a psychologist, but if you set small, little, easily achievable goals all the time you won’t be inspired by them, they won’t set your gut on fire, they won’t excite you and you may not even achieve them
Sure, to start your goal setting habits in the right direction you should set some small relatively easy goals to show you how the process works. But don’t, just don’t keep on setting goals that aren’t big enough. How tall are you? How high can you reach? How high can your team reach? What if you or they stretch a little bit more? What if you stretched just a little bit more – now how high can you reach? I bet it is further than you ever thought you could. I am sure you get the idea – set goals that can be achieved but only if you stretch to reach them. Set goals that are on the “top shelf” of life and business, not the easy to get ones on the bottom shelf. One approach is to set two goals, a minimum and a maximum, and aim to hit somewhere between them both. The first target would be an easier to reach goal, and the second a more challenging but achievable goal. For example, your goal might be to increase your profits by 10% with a challenge/stretch goal to increase them by 15%. Having both can really help; in fact it is standard business practice in many companies.
R is for Relevant. We are all different, we are all motivated by different things and in different ways so set goals for yourself or your team or your business that mean something to you. They might not be so important to others but they need to be important, relevant and meaningful to YOU or your business or team. If it doesn’t motivate you, you need to rethink it, rewrite it, reword it until it touches something in you, right inside you. Then take steps to achieve it, every day, every week, every month until you reach it.
T is for Time-Limited. We have all done it, we have all said I will get fit – wait for it – “one day” or “tomorrow” or “next week”. I have a goal like that: I am going to repaint the deck “sometime”. Yes, you guessed it, I am not highly motivated to paint my deck, I am more motivated in other directions. So when you set a goal you need to put a date on it, a time when you really will strive to achieve it. And to make it a little bit easier you should work backwards from your main goal and list the steps or objectives that you need to achieve along the way to achieving your main goal. For example, first I need to do A – clean the deck, then I need to do B – repair the timber, then C – nail up the loose boards, and so on until you have listed all the steps, tasks, actions, or objectives you need to achieve in order to reach that “top shelf goal” you are setting for yourself and that you really do want to achieve. Once you have listed those steps, put a date on when you plan to achieve each and every one, and tick it off as you go. But don’t worry about getting some of the dates wrong, you will get some wrong, just do the best you can, adapt as you go and work to towards your goal. This list of steps or tasks or objectives with dates, becomes your plan, your time based map to reach your destination. Use it and follow it and you will achieve your goals.
Well so much for SMART – it seems sensible doesn’t it? What can be hard about that?
Well maybe you don’t find it hard, but I personally find it hard, while others find it easy. For most people it is harder than it looks, we are each very different so what works for one may not work for the other. Most people and most businesses know they should set goals but many never do. Why does that happen? Sometimes we are scared to set goals for fear of not achieving them. Well, if that happens you or your business will be in very good company! Some of the largest companies and most famous people have failed to achieve some of their goals early on. They miss some, but achieve most of them. Sometimes people don’t achieve targets because they are not passionate about them. But when something really is important to me, I am passionate about it, I am driven by it, and I achieve it, sometimes very quickly. Maybe you have had that experience as well. From my experience I know that the best chance I have of achieving anything is to follow the SMART guidelines and I am sure if you do, you will have a much better chance of success as well.
To be SMART about our new Internet Business I knew I had to set hard attainable relevant meaningful goals and drive myself to achieve them in just the same way I did when I was in corporate life. So every day in the morning for a few weeks and whenever I get the chance I listen to advice from some of the masters in the field on what seems a simple topic: “How to set goals and achieve them”. I listened and listened until it started to become ingrained, though to be honest it still isn’t ingrained enough so I keep at it. Why – because I know it needs to become a powerful habit – I know our business will grow as a result. Setting goals will drive you and your business in a positive way. If you get it right you determination to succeed will be unstoppable!
Once I really understood the power of setting goals in each aspect of my life, and I stopped worrying about exactly how I would achieve each goal at the outset, and that was hard, then I did sit down and write them out. Then each day I read them, sometimes I change them, but each day they are driving me forward. They are like fuel to my motivation engine and the provide direction for my work and almost everything I do. Try it – it will help you, and your business and even more if you give it a chance. If you are in a team environment try reminding your team in a positive encouraging way every day or two what the goals or deadlines or targets are that you are trying to achieve together. It will definitely help.
I first wrote an earlier version of this article in my old Blogger account back in February 2009. Here is a link to that post.
Thanks for reading, now take some action, why don’t you set some goals right now!
Until next time
Owen
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