Are You Setting Attainable Goals?

Posted on January 12th, 2008 by Better Life, under goals, motivation, selfimprovement.

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Setting goals is a great way to keep yourself motivated. And there is nothing wrong with setting ambitious goals, but you need to be sure that your goals are still reasonable. If you set an ambitious goal and you reach it, it can be unbelievably motivating. On the other hand, if you set unreasonable goals and you fail to reach them, it can have the opposite effect.

Sometimes you may have trouble setting goals, because you may not know just how much you can complete, especially if you are developing a new system, or getting started in something you’ve never done before. The best way to make an estimate is to do a little bit of whatever it is you’ll be working on and see how much you can accomplish in a certain period of time.

Let’s say you are a writer and you are writing articles for use on the internet. Write two to four articles that you feel would be typical in size and subject to what you will normally be writing, and see how long this takes you. If it takes you one hour per article, and you work solely at writing articles for five hours per day, then you should be able to produce about five articles per day. If you work five days per week, then you should obviously be able to write about 25 articles per week, or around 100 per month. If you believe you can cut the time down to around 45 minutes per article after a bit of practice, you might adjust your goal to be 125 or 150 articles per month. You may end up quite a bit short near the end of the month, but you could make it up by spending an entire weekend writing, if you wanted to.

This goal of 125 to 150 articles would be a reasonable goal. It may be a bit ambitious, because you would be shooting for a goal of a bit higher than you estimated you could do, but it is still reasonable to expect that you might get faster with practice, or be able to make up any shortage by working extra hours.

One important thing to remember is to focus on what you DO accomplish. If you set that goal of 125 to 150 articles and you only get 110 completed, that’s ten more articles than you originally estimated you could complete! If you only get 80 finished, that is still 80 articles that you have available to use for whatever purpose you’re going to use them for. You’ve accomplished something real!

The purpose of setting goals is to motivate you, and to show you what needs to be done. You don’t absolutely HAVE to reach every single goal you ever set. You should always try not to feel too bad if you miss a goal, because getting reasonably close to your goal is still a real accomplishment, especially if your goal was somewhat ambitious already!

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