So today I want to talk about goals, targets and tasks.
Now in the past, we’ve talked about business planning and maybe creating a big business plan or a strategic plan. But these are different and I want you to understand the difference between goals and targets and tasks that you’re doing and how we can use each of them strategically to get to where we’re going the most efficient way.
Now I want you to think about your goal as being the destination, where you’re heading. And I want you to think about your targets as little checkpoints along the way. And, if we get to all those checkpoints, eventually we’ll make it to the destination.
A couple of examples of some goals. could be that you want to hit a certain level of turnover or maybe you want to build the business, sell it and have a nest egg for when you retire. Those are brilliant goals that you could set yourself.
Now, you might be somebody who likes really specific goals such as ‘I want to retire when I’m 50’ or you might be somebody who’s a little bit more generic and your goal might be ‘I want to be financially secure’. Those are both really tremendous goals, just different.
The reason these are so important is if you don’t have a clear picture of where you’re going, are you ever going to know if you’re on the right path or if you’ve managed to achieve it.
The problem with goals is they can be so far off. They can be such a long way in the future. I once heard Steve Redgrave talk about this brilliant way when we see another example of bringing into business, right? Steve is arguably one of the most successful Olympians of all times and had a career spanning 20 decades. He competed in five Olympics and won five consecutive gold medals.
Steve said for him, focusing on the next Olympics was just too far in the future. Have you ever heard that saying, how do you eat an elephant? It probably feels like that the next Olympics are so far off so what he did instead was he would set himself little targets along the way and that was a little bit more achievable. If he thought, I have to train twice a day every day for the next four years – how do you motivate yourself to do that?
So instead, what he would actually do is target smaller things to complete. He would focus on the next 10 strokes that he was doing and make them the best possible they could be or he’d set himself the target of doing the next 250 meters and breaking a certain time that he wanted to break. There are achievable little targets to set yourself and then what you need to do is you stack all of those targets up and eventually they lead towards your goal.
We can use this same approach as entrepreneurs with simple to-do lists.
Now it might seem really simple, after all all we seem to do as entrepreneurs is write to-do lists, but I want to talk to you about how I manage mine.
So at the start of every day, I will plan my day. I will sit down and I’ll work out, right, what emails do I want to send. What calls do I need to make? What specific actions do I need to take? And writing all of these down gives me something to focus on so that I can see exactly what I need to get done that day and where I’m heading.
Now, a couple of tips – some people like to do things electronically. That’s great, I personally prefer to write them down.
Even if it’s not on an old fashioned piece of paper with a pen and I do it on my electronic tablet, I like to have a handwritten list and it’s that feeling of writing something down and it forces you to think about exactly what it is we’re doing.
The rule is, what goes on the list must get done. There’s no point putting things on there thinking, ‘I’ll probably never get round to that’ because if you’re disciplined about your to-do list, you will only write things down that you know you need to get done.
Here’s another little trick that I use when I’m writing things down.
I like the physical thought of crossing things off, but I don’t always like to put a line through it. So I remember learning this from one of my bosses back when I was at university. She used to draw a little square and then write the to-do list so that when she worked through it, she put a little tick in the square.
I’ve been known from time to time that if I’ve done something that wasn’t on my to-do list, I’ll write it out draw my box and tick it! It’s just that feeling of having achieved something because I can see as I’m getting through the list, visual representation at any point of the day. Even if I feel like I’m not doing well and I haven’t achieved much, I can look down at my to-do list see that I’ve actually got a lot of things ticked off and I know that I’m heading in the right direction.
However, I still want you to think about being quite specific with what you’re writing down. So, for example, if you have to call a certain supplier, you could just write ‘call supplier X’ or you could write ‘call supplier X, need to renegotiate the pricing on this product, need to feedback on how this has got done and I need to set a date for our next meeting’. I know what I need to get out of that call so it’s a slightly bigger to-do list but it gives you the headspace to focus on what that task is going to be and how you are going to achieve it.
And then another great thing with these is, if you’re ever having a really bad day and you’re just feeling like you’re not winning at life, you can look down on your to-do list and think, actually, I’ve done all right today, I’ve achieved something.
So, in summary. Your goals, they’re the big picture things, they’re where we’re heading but they could be a lot of years out, right? It might take months or even years to get there. Your targets, they’re really specific.
Those are the things, the checkpoints along the way that we’re going to work towards. Now some people might have them for the day, for the week, for the month, but try not to have them too far out. then finally your actions, what we actually need to do to make sure that we achieve those targets, which set us in the right direction so that one day we want to make sure we achieve our goals.