(myorganizedbiz.com) – The last few days we’ve concentrated on setting SMART goals. Sitting down and thinking about what you want to accomplish is an important part of your business.

The acronym SMART stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely

Each day we went over ways that you can improve your goals by really thinking about what you want and then setting yourself up for successful completion. Your goals should fall in line with your business vision. They should be dynamic and motivating, not unmeasurable and frustrating.

Have you been taking a harder look at your goals? Are you happy with your professional goals? What can you do to make them better? What piece(s) of SMART goal setting will help you the most? How?

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Most of us are trying to find ways to be more responsible in our lives and businesses. Working towards being greener and more sustainable. It’s not easy, especially when we depend on stuff and paperwork. Did we ever imagine our businesses would involve so much paper?

But besides paper clutter, there are other ways to go green in your office, and Dumb Little Man gives us nine. So go take a look and then tell us, what are you doing to make your office more sustainable?

(myorganizedbiz.com) – Our final piece of goal-setting is making sure your goals are timely. Yes, goals must incorporate an element of time in order to be tangible.

When you set a goal, you must have a starting time. When do you plan to start working on your goal? If you never give it a starting point, it will be easy to keep putting it off until you “have the time.” But if you don’t schedule it and make the time, you’ll never magically find the time.

Your goal must also have an end time. A neverending goal frustrates people. We need a sense of accomplishment from being able to say something is done. Make your goal small enough that you can assign an end point.

Deadlines are a big part of helping people get motivated to finish something.Without a time for completion, long-term projects get pushed aside for day-to-day and urgent tasks. And assigning a deadline to employees can help them plan their workload. An open-ended project sounds nice, but it’s really a project that will probably never happen.

Don’t just assign an arbitrary due date. Take into consideration the steps to accomplish the goal and plan accordingly. Don’t rush yourself, but don’t allow too much time to get distracted with other things.

Do you assign deadlines to your goals? Does it help motivate you to make progress on them? How?

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(myorganizedbiz.com) – We’re getting close to the end of our series about setting goals. And today the topic is making your goals relevant.What comes to mind when you think of a relevant goal? First, it must be relevant to you. It must fit you. And it has to be something that you have control over, that you can complete.

If you set a goal that it’ll be a nice day for the company picnic and that everyone will have fun, it’s a nice goal but it’s not relevant to you. You can’t control the weather. And you certainly can’t control others’ reactions to things. What you can do is plan to have sufficient food and entertainment for everyone without going over a specific budget. Those are things you can work on.

The same thing applies to your employees. Give them goals that they can work towards, but bring your company closer to what you envision it will be. Make sure it’s relevant to them, that it’s an activity that they can have a direct impact on.

Have you been thinking more about your goals with this series? Do you even think setting goals is relevant to you? Your business? Why or why not?

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In this next piece of our SMART goal series, let’s talk about making a goal attainable. What do you think is attainable for your business goals? Try for something that makes you stretch a little, but doesn’t put the goal out of your reach. For instance, learning to speak Italian in two months is not an attainable goal for most people. But learning basic greetings and simple words in two months is perfectly reachable.

If you set your goal too high, you can feel like a failure, like you’re not good enough when you don’t complete the task. If you set it too low and you don’t have to work at it, you’ll either ignore the goal or get bored with it. The same goes for your employees. They need to feel that they have a reasonable chance of meeting the goal with a standard or slightly above-standard performance. You want to build their confidence and help them find their strengths.

Have you ever set goals for yourself and then realized they weren’t really attainable? How did you feel? Did you adjust the goal to something more reasonable, or did you just scrap the goal entirely?

Find previous SMART goal posts here: Part I: Specific and Part II: Measurable.

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(myorganizedbiz.com) – To continue our series on SMART goals, we’ll talk about designing a measurable goal. What is that, anyway?

A measurable goal should be quantifiable. You, and your employees, need something to work towards. You need milestones. How will you measure progress if you don’t have milestones?

For example, which of these goals is measurable?

• In the next five years, we’d like to grow our customer base and increase sales.

• In the next five years, we’d like to see a 50% return rate from our new customers and increase sales 10% each year during that time.

Those aren’t perfect examples, but you can tell which one is measurable, right? Once you know how to quantify your goals, you can track your progress. And making actual progress, and being able to see it, is one of the points of setting goals in the first place.

And if you have employees, measurable goals is equally important for them. If you want them to stay motivated, they must have milestones for indicating progress. One of the things that used to frustrate me was having vague goals tacked onto my evaluation. The results were completely subjective, and that certainly didn’t help motivate me to get them done. I’m the type that will do my best to meet them anyway, but milestones would have lessened my frustration and lack of control.

Do you set measurable goals? Do you feel like you make actual progress when you do?

(myorganizedbiz.com) – In order to set your goals and achieve them, you have to be SMART in your planning. And it starts by being Specific.

Goals that are vague are goals that just sit around. You can’t work towards something nebulous like “success” until you’ve defined what success means to you. Is success working less than 40 hours while still caring for you and your family? Is it a certain dollar amount in the bank? Is it just doing something you love?

Clear, specific goals give you something to work towards. You are setting your expectations of things. Of yourself. If you don’t have an end (or a goal) in sight, it’s easy to get distracted or not realize how much (or how little) progress you’ve made.

Every business needs goals. You want to measure your business’s progress, right? And if you have employees you’ll want to measure their progress as well. Make sure they know what is expected, when, and how much. Specific expectations will help avoid any confusion.

In our next part of the series, we’ll talk about making your goals measurable.

I would still like to get your opinion on things here at My Organized Biz. Please feel free to continue to add your thoughts to the open thread from last week.

The more feedback we have from you, the more relevant the content on this site can be. We have some good suggestions – let’s get a few more. After all, I want you to keep coming back, and to share your experiences – good and bad – with us.

(myorganizedbiz.com) – Sometimes I forget to do things. I have the best of intentions, but I just can’t remember everything. But if I put it on my calendar and then get a reminder, I’m golden. Otherwise, it can be hit or miss. And I really hate that it’s that way.

As I get older (and I am really loathe to say that) I have too many things going on to give everything equal attention. Small things can slip through if I”m not careful. Reminders have saved me more than once.

Today’s link is all about using reminders. Lifehack has a great article called “Back to Basics: Reminders.” It’s a subject that we’ll probably take a look at again soon.

What type of reminders work for you? Paper? E-mail? Calendar pop-ups? White board?

(myorganizedbiz.com) – Goals are an important part of our businesses. If you don’t set goals, how will you know if you’re progressing? How will you measure your business success?

In order to remember your goals, you should write them down. Make yourself accountable by putting them on paper, on your computer, in your PDA, on your bulletin board. Whatever works and reminds you – frequently – of that goal.

But you should also make your goal attainable. Don’t set yourself up for failure by listing nebulous goals. I will be a successful businessperson within the next 5 years. That’s vague, isn’t it? What is success? How will you get there? What steps do you need to take in those 5 years?

It takes time to think about your goals, what you really want to accomplish. The SMART acronym is a helpful tool in setting goals. And over the course of the next few posts, we’ll talk about SMART goals and how you can design them to fit your needs.

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely

If you keep those things in mind during your planning, you’ll have a much better chance at meeting your goals. Stay tuned to find out the details of each characteristic of a well-planned goal.