Edwin A. Locke authored a famous piece of research called, ‘Toward a theory of task motivation and incentives’. Not a very catchy title, but it was 1968! His research was to become famous because of the conclusion we now know as ‘S.M.A.R.T’. You’ve probably heard of ‘SMART goal setting’. In principle the research alerts us to the fact that unless goals are specific and challenging we’ll probably not achieve them.
I left college in the 1990’s and started my first job. Selling water filtration. A disaster. Though being told, ‘No, I don’t want one. Leave me alone sonny’, and much much worse, many times a day, toughens the skin! My boss used to tell me, ‘Sell more Smith’, just sell’. I did try to sell more. I came back to the office one day and was pleased to tell him that I’d sold two. ‘Two’, he shouted. ‘I wanted twenty-two’. I didn’t know then what I know now. He hadn’t been specific. Not even close. This was what Edwin Locke had uncovered. Unfortunately, my boss had not read it.
In my day-to-day work as a time management trainer I see some people that are excellent time managers. Or at least they have an effective system. Generally they also read and learn the latest time management tips. The problem is that they don’t know where they are going. Like Stephen Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, where he talks of two lumberjacks working hard but one stops to sharpen the saw. I extend his metaphor to ask, ‘Are they chopping down trees in the right forest?’ There’s no point in busting a gut to chop down trees if they are the wrong trees. Time management can be like that. Work had, work efficiently, but absolutely know that you are working towards a goal.
Harvard carried out a piece of research in 1953 that is still quoted today. The ‘goal writing’ research interviewed people that had left Harvard year ago and how successful they were. This research told us that less than 3% of people set goals, but those that did are earning 10 times more. How about including goals into your time management system? This is quite simple, yet, less than 3% of people do it. The results you can expect are to get more done of what you need to get done because you’ll simply be more focused.
Using a simple template it is easy to incorporate goals into your time management system. The template below shows a one pager of ‘Weekly Goals’ with 7 rows beneath it. Before your week starts begin by writing down 7 goals. Things that you want to achieve that week. Remember that the goals need to be specific and challenging. For example, ‘Write a report on the xyz project’, or ‘Meet with each member of my team to motivate them’. Why 7? It’s the world’s lucky number!
To form a habit takes 21 times. You need to write your weekly goals every week for half a year to form the habit. Once the habit is formed then incorporate monthly goals and then annual goals. These templates can be downloaded at the bottom of this article.
Setting goals is the easy part. Once you have included this easy piece into your time management system of setting weekly goals you need to evaluate how you did.
Evaluating is to be scheduled for the end of the week. It involves using another simple template. This template uses a tool from Edward De Bono, the founder of lateral thinking. One of his ‘Direction Attention Thinking Tools’ is ‘P.M.I.’, which stands for ‘Positive, Minus and Interesting’. At the end of the week write 3 things that were positive about this week, 3 things that were not so good (minus) about this week and 3 things that were just interesting about this week. Once you have completed those rows write 1 action that, from a time management perspective, you will do differently next week. For example, ‘Move the team meeting to Thursday pm’, or ‘Write only 10 things on my daily to do list’, or ‘Start using time boxing’.
The paired evaluation templates, e.g. ‘Monthly Evaluation’ and ‘Annual Evaluation’, to go with the goal setting templates can also be downloaded at the bottom of this article.
Setting goals is important. Setting specific and challenging goals is really important. Adding this to your time management system can significantly improve how effective you are with your time. Then to evaluate these goals works towards the continuous improvement formula that Brian Tracy, the time management guru, talks of. Brian states that if you can improve your time management by 0.1% each day, in ten years it will have improved by 1,004%!
Download ’14 Time Management Templates’.