With Milestones to the Top

October 26th, 2007 by Carmen Schubert

To be successful in goal achievement, you have to set SMART goals that are Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic as well as Time and Resource constraint. The challenge hereby lays in the process and the actions involved to reach the goal. Setting goals usually involves long-term planning. To reach this goal, you also have to think of the mid-term planning as well as daily business activities. Those are three stages that you have to pass through on your way to the goal achievement.

Once you have understood this approach (and you act according to it), you will see that setting and achieving goals become easier. Let me explain with the help of the graphic below how this works.

First of all, you should keep in mind those three different stages when setting goals. Each stage is different and therefore, requires another approach. If you want to achieve your goals successfully, you have to break them down into several subgoals. Those subgoals can be seen as milestones in project management. The “project” hereby is to achieve the goal. Just an example to illustrate this. If your goal is to become a freelancer and start up your own business, you have to take different actions in order to put this goal into action. Office established and setting an IT infrastructure up and running are two milestones in this example in order to come closer to the goal.

Similar to a project, you define a starting point and a deadline for your subgoal and you assign specific tasks and actions to it. Hereby, it is also important to set priorities for each goal. This simplifies your goal achievement.

In the next step, you have to think of appropriate tasks and activities in your daily business that helps you accomplish your goal. During this approach, monitoring the results and process of goal achievement is important.

You can do it on paper. But with the proper tool it is more convenient. In the next article, I will demonstrate how to integrate this approach into your daily business using DAISHO.

2 Responses to “With Milestones to the Top”