Are your goals too specific?

That sounds like a crazy question to even ask, right?  After all, one of the key elements of an effective goal is that it’s specific! For myself, though, I’ve noticed a trend in certain types of goals.  These are goals where the idea is to accomplish a lot of one overarching idea, but I know I won’t finish it, so I set the goal to accomplish a certain subset.  That was probably about as clear as mud, so let me give an example.

Let’s say the true aim is to eventually overhaul the organization of the whole house.  And I know I won’t get it all done this year, but I want to make a certain degree of progress.  In the past, I might have set goals to, for instance, “organize the dining room,” “organize the living room,” and “organize the library.”  What I found would happen, though, is I would kind of “go with the flow” of what I was in the mood for or what presented the biggest immediate need, etc. and might make significant progress during the year — on things that weren’t part of my list.  The net result was that it looked like I wasn’t really accomplishing anything, because most of my written goals were left undone at the end of the year.

I decided this year to try something a little different.  It allows me some flexibility, but still provides a concrete measuring stick.

The Tweak

What I did was create “running lists” for certain goals, and wrote the goal up as completion of a certain number of items from that list.  The list provides some focus, and the goal is still pretty concrete — a certain number of items completed — but there’s more flexibility in which things come first.

In the organizing example above, the list includes all the major areas, as well as a couple of “special projects” that require organization (like getting all my photos in order).  So the basic goal is still the same: get a certain amount of organizing done.  There’s still enough structure to ensure it isn’t open-ended and I’m not floundering: the things/categories/places to be organized are specific.  But at the same time, I can adapt a bit to circumstances throughout the year.

I have several goals set up this way this year, so we’ll see how that works out.

Tweaking the Tweak

You can use a bit of a twist on this if you want this type of flexibility overall, but need for one or a few things to take priority.  If one thing takes priority, you can make it separate.  For instance:

• Organize the dining room.
• Organize two other rooms from the list.

Or if the list is “tiered” in importance, you can set it up that way.  Divide the list into primary and secondary items, or star the more important items, and set a goal to “complete x items from the list, including at least x of the priority items.”

When Not to Use This

This is not an ideal approach for every goal!  Many times, you’ll just want to be clear and specific, period.  But for big project-type goals where you anticipate completing only part of the overall project, it may be a good way to provide structure without rigidity.

Have you ever tried this?  How did it work for you?