Identifying and Prioritizing Your Goals

Goals are the starting point of effective time management. They act as a compass, pointing the way to the things that you should be concentrating on.

Identify your goals and you will know what is most important to accomplish on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Goal setting is a formal process of defining outcomes worth achieving. When you set goals, you commit to outcomes that you can accomplish personally or through your team.
By setting goals and measuring their achievement, you can:

• Focus on what is most important
• Provide a unified direction for your team
• Devote less energy to non-critical tasks
• Avoid time-wasters
• Motivate yourself
• Boost overall job satisfaction
• Goals vary in terms of time frames and importance. Thus, it’s vital to understand how to categorize and prioritize them.

Types of goals
Goals can be categorized—in order of importance—as critical, enabling, or nice-tohave.
The table below outlines the differences.

Type	Definition	Example
Critical	Objectives that must be accomplished in order for your department or unit to continue running successfully	For a project manager, completing a two-year project on time and within budget would be a critical goal.
Enabling	Objectives that create a more desirable business condition in the long run or take advantage of a business opportunity	For a product development manager, providing training that enables his or her team to work more effectively would be an enabling goal.
Nice-tohave	Objectives that enhance your business—by making activities faster, easier, or more appealing—but don’t revolutionize your business	For a unit manager, developing a new expense-reporting form that’s easier to complete and takes less time to fill out than the current form would be a nice-to-have goal.

Your critical and enabling goals are most crucial and should guide the way you manage your time.

Align your goals.
Managers should create a set of cascading goals, beginning with company goals.
Unit goals should, in turn, support company goals. Individual goals should then support the unit goals. These three levels of goals—company, unit, and individual—should be aligned and communicated so that an individual employee can say (without prompting):

“Our company’s goal is to _____________. My department’s contribution to that goal is to_______________. And my part in this effort is to ____________.”

Consider your company. How explicitly has management defined and communicated its highest goals to managers and employees?

If you are a manager, how effectively have you spelled out corporate-level goals to your unit and its individual members?

Does each person understand the company’s goals and his or her part in working towards them? By formulating and communicating clear goals, you help yourself and your employees make the most of their time at work.

Prioritize your goals.
Prioritizing your goals means ranking them in importance. You can do this in two ways:

• Identify critical and enabling goals. List all your on-the-job goals for the year. Which are critical?  Which are enabling? Which are merely nice-to-have?  Write down the reasons you’ve defined each goal as you did. Then rank the goals in order of priority.
• Distinguish between urgent and crucial tasks. Urgent tasks demand immediate attention. But every urgent matter does not necessarily support a critical goal.
  For example, suppose you’re overseeing a big project that must be completed on
  time and within budget this year. Your boss wants you to participate in an all-day
  seminar on employee development tomorrow, but you had planned to meet with your
  project team to discuss the project plan. The seminar demands your immediate
  attention—but it doesn’t directly support your critical goals. Thus, while it’s urgent
  (you have to make time for it immediately), it is not necessarily crucial.

Urgent tasks tend to consume your immediate attention, crowding out time and resources better allocated to critical goals. This problem typically occurs when critical goals are long-term because there’s no need (or possibility) to achieve them immediately.

What urgent tasks are you facing this week?
Make a list. Which tasks support your critical and/or enabling goals?  Those that do are the tasks that you should focus on first and foremost.

Discipline yourself to differentiate between urgent tasks that support critical and enabling goals and those that don’t. Once you recognize the difference, you’ll know best how to prioritize your work and allocate your time.