Make your goals SMART: Timely

(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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