In my experience goals must be:

○ Attainable
○ Relevant
○ Specific
○ Measurable, and
○ Time bound

I have always set goals, even when I have been employer free. I have not always written them down – That is a change I have made in recent years because if we write them down we tend to focus on them more in our everyday lives.

All of our milestones need to be tangible – but often in a business environment they need to be focused around business cycles. e.g. if you are selling sun-tan lotion then reaching and perhaps exceeding targets is easier in July than December.

Every goal needs to to be challenging, yet inspire a person to reach them, e.g. getting up at 6 am to complete your exercises  before going to work at least twice per week may be an important personal goal. A person needs to remain committed to achieving them, it helps where it is tied to a personal desire – less so when it is a boring work task e.g. delivering the weekly status report by 10 am every Monday morning. Yet as a goal the boring task is as important to business success as the exciting one.

The goals need to be flexible. Personally I have 30, 60 and 90 day goals for me personally and for my business. I write these down and then check progress against them as time goes on. Flexibility is important, especially where a goal involves other people – they may not have the same desires as you or fee that the target is as important as you feel it to be. I had a December 31st goal that could not be achieved because of the inaction of others, yet it was more than achieved on January 5th, the second working day of the new year.

My 30, 60, and 90 day goals allows me to have attainable deliverables. The problem with annual targets is that we tend not to think about them in the first half of the year then panic about them in the last quarter. Breaking the target down into 30 day segments makes the focus more achievable, nail the first 30 days (or better still do better than expected) then you are well on you way to the annual goal. I have always found it curious that when when you reach one target other things start falling into place to enable you to reach others, like wasting for a bus then six arriving at the same time.

I tend to re-write my goals every day – this helps me focus on the contents. It is about getting things done. Then I reward myself when I reach milestones. At a recent Toastmasters meeting someone talked about writing down your goals, diary-ing them, and sharing them with others. It has always been the later that has been my greatest personal challenge.

We can often look at others, who seem to have their stack of work perfectly arranged and appear unflustered whenever things go wrong. We can be the same, and this will help us deliver our projects on-time, irrespective of that last minute curve-ball thrown our way.

For anyone wishing to turn around how they organise themselves I heartily recommend you read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it is a great book and the basis for much of this article. Before reading David’s book I had struggled to find my own philosophy for getting things done most of the other approaches or software I have seen don’t really work.

Some of the problems we face:

• New demands
• Insufficient resources
• The changing nature of our work
• Too many deadlines

If you can capture and complete all tasks that need to be done then you can certainly be a star within your organisation.

With all ‘stuff’ that we must do irrespective of whether that is a complex task like writing a justification for a project, or the act of picking up out suit from the dry cleaners needs to get prioritised somewhere within our day. So to be successful in organising ourselves there is not really any separation between ‘things for work’ and other tasks it is simply a matter of where we will do the activity.

Any ‘stuff’ that is to be done is logically in our in-basket (even if we do not possess a physical basket).With every item we must know what it is and decide if it actionable. With every new idea you can make one of the following choices

• Do it,
• Defer it,
• Delegate it, or
• Drop it.

Non-actionable items may be filed as reference material, or thrown away.

Actionable items require some action to resolve them. An item can either be responded to immediately, put for future action, it can be delegated, or included as part of a project.

If we are going to respond immediately David Allen suggests it should take no longer than two minutes to complete these tasks – I will do it now it it takes less than 10 minutes. An invitation to attend a conference in 9 months time may be interesting but we do not need to take action on it today therefore we file it in a future action file. At some future date we can decide whether or not to attend. Likewise that nice-to-have requirement by the production manager. We can therefore file it for future review. A future action should either be either entered in the diary, or filed for future review.

We have to continue to review these items at the appropriate time, in a series of files that we look at daily. David Allen calls these a tickler file. We have day files 1 to 31 and monthly files January to December. We bring an item from where we filed it to the front by continuing to review our files and then performing the relevant action at the relevant time. That conference next September has an ‘early saver’ deadline in July so we place it for future action next July. That requirement for the production manager is placed in the active file for 10th of next month (day file 10). As time goes on each file cycles to the back, ready for re-use.

If we decide to delegate it, then we are taking the decision to place an item on another person’s work queue. The person we may delegate will be the most appropriate person in the corporation. It may even be the President of the company. Within your own team it is important to understand the the team workloads. Remember you are adding to the team activity list by this action. When delegating a task to someone outside our team the appropriate level of diplomacy is required. This is especially true if you are adding to the already bulging actions for the CEO.

Within the IT team actionable items are essentially the lifeblood of the department and the IT leader needs to have their finger on the pulse.

It is not possible to do every task placed in front of us. At the end of the day you need to trust in your system and ensure it works for you. If lists fall behind reality then you will always be playing catch-up. When you trust your system you can feel fine about both the things you are going to do, as well as those you will not. Additionally within IT there should only be a limited number of ways that a team will pull activities off the work queue. Team members need to ensure that nothing gets in through back-door personal request.

By Peter B. Giblett