Goals and Tasks

I recently finished Donald Rumsfeld's book Known and Unknown. In addition to being a breathtakingly up close and personal look at 50 years of American history, Rumsfeld is the guy to read if you want to know how to set and accomplish your goals. (Forget the self-help books on the subject; here is a guy who did it, repeatedly. He also beats the self-helps because he doesn't start out with "I set a goal to make a million dollars before I turned 30. I did it and so can you.") The book is back at the library but Rumsfeld wrote something to this effect: Be certain to make sure your strategy to meet your objective doesn't become the objective. You need to constantly re-evaluate if what you are doing is still taking you toward meeting your goal; if it isn't reexamine the strategy and find something that works. 

I tend to get bogged down in one of two extremes.

1) I set goal after goal without any strategy as to how I'll meet that goal. I love lofty goals; generally the tasks required are where I get lost. A common problem among dreamers, those folks who buy all the "how to" books but never lose a pound, pay down their debt, or put anything toward retirement. They keep buying the get rich books but ignoring the reality that they are going to have to live like paupers and work like bees to get anywhere. I am that woman who talks about how she is going to lose some weight while downing a piece of pie. (And I don't mean the European-sized slice.)

or

2) I get so task-driven I fail to keep in mind the goal while driving everyone in my family insane.  This one is easier for me to work out on others, particularly my children. After a nice couple of weeks off school, Ben started his math yesterday and the griping and complaining started and I was ready to put him on the bus to go to school by the time Mike came home. I had some time to myself last night and it started to hit me that Ben is good at math and that his math curriculum is very busy and written for the poorest math student who just can't seem to "get it." Today I pulled out his lesson and realized that he was working nearly every day on concepts he learned two years ago. And doing boring, repetitious problems to boot. Years ago, my teachers recognized I didn't need to do ALL of the problems; why couldn't I figure this out? Because I was task-driven. You must finish this lesson; you must finish this book by the end of the year. (Oh, we're behind.) So I killed two birds with one stone and crossed out half of two lessons. He took liberties and crossed out some more hoping I wouldn't notice but quickly acquiesced. And was quite delighted to double up his progress and skip a bunch of busy work.

In years past, my goal-setting has gone something like this:

• Get more exercise. 
• Eat healthier. 
• Waste less time. 

There is no strategy included and no way for me to be able to meet those goals if I don't have a plan. 

So this year, I'm going beyond goal-setting and developing strategies to help me meet my goals. Which is far more challenging.

To Be Continued....