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Beware The Hidden Danger: Prioritizing Your Goals
Posted on January 10th, 2008 by Better Life, under goals, motivation, wealth.
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You’ve probably heard how important it is to set goals when you are self-employed. It’s very true. Goals are absolutely vital to your success. Every successful entrepreneur sets goals. Some of them put their goals on paper, some in electronic format, and some just keep them in their head. But successful entrepreneurs know that they need to set goals, not only for what they want to accomplish, but on what deadline!
In order to get things done, you should decide what it is that you want to get done within the next 30-60 days (short-term) and what you would like to accomplish within the next 60 days to several years. Once you have your list of short term goals, you can begin to prioritize them. You may wonder how to decide which things you need to accomplish first. Well, there are several ways to go about this, but the most common way is to put your larger, more complex tasks first, especially any that you are really dreading. There are a couple of reasons for this, but mostly it is because having those large, potentially nerve-wracking tasks out of the way gives you room to breathe and can be highly motivating!
I read a story once about a time management professional who was speaking to a college business class. He put a wide-mouthed glass jar on the desk in front of him and proceeded to fill the jar with large, fist-sized stones.
When the jar would hold no more stones, he asked the class, “Is this jar full?” Of course the students responded that it was indeed full. “No!” he responded.
Then he took a bag of small gravel from underneath the desk and began pouring it into the jar. He shook the jar and the tiny pieces of gravel began to filter down into the crevices between the stones. When the gravel reached the top, he asked again, “Now is the jar full?” One student said, “Probably not.” “Right!” the teacher responded, pulling a bag of sand out from under the desk. He poured the sand into the jar, and the students watched the sand fill in the areas between the stones and the gravel.
“Now is it full?” he asked. “No!” shouted the entire class. “Right again!” the man exclaimed, taking a pitcher of water out from under the desk and pouring it into the jar until it was level with the mouth of the jar.
“Now, what was I trying to teach you?” he asked the class.
One student responded, “That we can fit more and more things into our schedule if only we will try?”
“No,” he replied. “I wanted to teach you that if you don’t put the big ones in first, you’ll NEVER fit it all in!”
This is a great story, because it is a fantastic metaphor for the fact that we need to put our biggest and most difficult jobs near the top of our list of priorities, otherwise we will never get everything done. The more difficult and the more important a task is, the more priority it needs. Only you can decide what is urgent, what is important, and what is a low priority, but hopefully this story will help you realize that you should never delay these large tasks simply because you don’t want to do them right away.
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