By John Pejchl
Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant to your mission and purpose. Finally, they need to have a deadline. The fifth letter of the S.M.A.R.T. method for goal setting stands for “Time.”
There are three reasons why time is important to achieving goals.
Goals without deadlines are rarely met
Have you ever achieved any new year’s resolutions you set? If not, I bet it lacked a time frame. Without a set deadline, we don’t have the needed pressure to act. We can use deadlines to build pressure, not a debilitating pressure, but enough to drive us to our goal. Good pressure can move us toward success. The right amount of pressure makes us work harder to achieve our goal.
Time measures the closeness to our goal
I’m in the middle of a goal where I will lose 83 pounds by the end of this year. I can measure this daily, weekly, or monthly. To succeed, I need to lose 0.22 pounds daily. Weekly, I have to lose 1.54 pounds. Each month, I have to lose 6.6 pounds. My time constraints tell me that If I reach those numbers in each of the time frames, I will hit my goal. I will have lost 83 pounds in one year. Knowing how close I’m getting drives me to be even more diligent toward my success.
Time Frames become milestones of success
The third reason for having a time frame for your goal is so you can measure how far along the path you are to your goal. The further along your goal progresses, the more excited you get. As this excitement builds, you find the ability to reach your goal quicker than planned.
A bonus for having a timestamp is your ability to use past goals to help develop future goals. Tracking our time allows us to see progress. This forward movement demonstrates that our activities are working. It energizes us to set more courses for success. The key is breaking down the big goal into daily, weekly, or monthly tasks. Goal setting can be a science.
© 2020 by John Pejchl