A successful approach to achieving attainable goals is to start with meticulous planning. Whether you are making a career or business plan or strategizing a significant event in life, it’s important to be able to gauge your goals with specific metrics.
What’s Your Story?
In my line of work, I’ve met a lot of people who have great ideas and interesting tales to tell. Those stories, on the other hand, are dispersed and stranded. It’s almost as though they exist to entertain rather than to educate.
You must have had remarkable experiences floating around in the abyss of consciousness, waiting for a purpose to propel them into the real world. If you wish to achieve your objectives, incorporating these ideas into your plan will enhance its long-term viability in an innovative and competitive world.
Failure to relate your story to your wants and long-term goals will rob your motivation of a personal touch that will provide you with a sense of urgency as you work toward achieving your objectives.
Use the metrics below to get started as you explore ways to measure your goals and your ability to achieve them.
1. Your “What” and “How”
John Doerr, author of Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rocked the World with OKRs, discusses the importance of setting the right goals on one’s path to success in this Ted Talk. More importantly, he highlights the importance of answering the questions “what,” “how,” and “why” when achieving business objectives.
Speaking fondly of his former manager professor Andy Grove, Doerr discusses Grove’s theory of OKRs employed by big businesses worldwide.
He divides the goal-setting system into objectives and key results. Objectives are what he calls the “direction” one gives to your business approach, and key results are simple.
Objective: The “What”
Your objective is whatever you want to achieve. It is supposed to be realistic, action-oriented, and inspirational. It helps you streamline your attainable goals and strategies while allowing you to prioritize what is crucial and urgent.
Key Results: The “How”
Your key results are a continuation of the objective—asking how you plan to complete a task and assisting with progress measurement.
They’re tethered to a number that’s realistic, time-bound, and aggressive. Identifying the “how” part enables you to nurture your plans and immediately identify your strengths and areas for improvement.
The Important Part: How to Set Attainable Goals
When setting goals, one must have a personal standard of measuring. Some people are just starting out in their careers, therefore the standard of assessment for them will be different than for those with years of expertise planning to progress something they’ve been working on for a long time.
Consider the following sentence:
As assessed by, I shall.
A goal’s essential essence is determined by its measurement. You don’t have an aim without it; all you have is a wish. You’ll stay on track if you fill in the blanks with unique objectives and key outcomes.
For instance, I will create a profitable firm based on the amount of revenue generated.
OKR Example
Here’s what an OKR for a content creation process looks like:
Objective: A creative that generates conversations (brand lift) and leads to conversions (business lift).
Key Results:
- Implement five channels and a monthly editorial plan to create hero content depending on the lowest viable content audience.
- By January 2022, create a central content series with unambiguous calls to action.
- Every month, you’ll be able to write two guest posts.
This succinct and actionable example incorporates everything we’ve discussed thus far. Even simple OKRs can help you achieve your attainable goals if you work hard enough.
OKRs will also help keep you focused on what’s important without succumbing to procrastination.
2. Why Are You Doing What You’re Doing?
Attainable life goals are more than just a set of objectives to meet; they represent a person’s desires, passions, drives, and sometimes even identity.
Enriching your tale with these aspects creates an emotional connection with your target audience by removing disparities between people and bringing them all together through shared memory or experience.
Brands including Timberland, eBay, Hershey, IBM, Tesla, and Microsoft, among others, stood by a social mission addressing the environment, children, and medical science in a Forbes piece spotlighting corporations driven by purpose in 2019.[1]
Their tales focused on social concerns that affected the broader public, which improved their reputation. The zeitgeist of 2020, however, has its idiosyncrasies due to a variety of factors.
3. Assess Your Plan According to Today’s Reality
Given the limited resources available at the outset, bringing a business to life is a difficult task. The issues have become even greater in light of the present Covid epidemic.
In the post-crisis period, organizations will need to put forward relevant purposes in their marketing, according to a McKinsey & Company essay on the consequences for business in the 2020 epidemic.[2]
Because the epidemic has wreaked havoc on the economy, businesses will need to put in more effort in their marketing campaigns.
Volatility, complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of concepts and trends are currently the most typical issues that enterprises and individuals confront.
With the arrival of the new normal, many techniques that worked in the pre-pandemic era are no longer relevant in the aftermath of the global medical disaster.
The digital revolution of practically everything remains the most significant change. This might be a struggle or an opportunity, depending on how well prepared you are.
With that in mind, whether you’re pursuing a business goal or a career goal, being up to date on recent social and economic changes can help you make better judgments and, ultimately, set more reachable goals.
A Few Simple Guidelines to Keep in Mind
Less Is More
You might feel the urge to include more and more pointers in your list, but it is better to manage your OKRs between 3 to 5 per cycle. This will keep you from getting overwhelmed.
Stay Flexible
Pushing yourself to your limits is good, but it should not make you feel incapable. If an objective or key result seems irrelevant, get rid of it.
Dare to Fail
People achieve more when their goals require them to grow beyond their current capability, so sometimes, failing to meet your goals is okay. You will locate your weaknesses that way.
Be Patient
This is a process, and trial and error is your friend. You will do it poorly before you do it with excellence, so have faith in yourself and persevere!
Final Thoughts
Make sure your strategy is well-detailed and executable, since the three questions “what,” “how,” and “why” constitute the blueprint for a plan and the formation of an attainable objective.
Your arrows will always take you in the direction of success if you start and end with these inquiries. You’ll be well on your way to accomplishing your goals if you understand how to measure them.
Reference:
2. McKinsey & Company: COVID-19: Implications for business