Take a moment to enter at least one step from each goal into your PDA or organizer.
Revisit Your Goals Regularly
What you have now is a good start. However, you need a way to make sure you keep with the system. On the first day of the month, every month, take a moment to plan your goals. Close your office door (or go to a quiet place) and do the following:
Goal review. Review and update your goal list. Cross out any completed goals. If you've jotted down any new goals since the last goal review, decide if they still sound like good ideas. If they do, prioritize them. Evaluate your prioritization of existing goals vis-à-vis the new goals you've added.
Step review. Review and update your next steps list. As steps are marked "done," schedule later steps into your to do lists, as before.
Over time, you'll get much better at figuring out how to schedule the next steps into your calendar. I try to sprinkle them into Mondays so that when I plan my week, I can make room for them, sliding them to a better day if needed.
How can you remember to do this? Set a repeated event in your PDA called "Goal & Next Step Review." Have it repeat on the first of every month or the first Monday of every month. Now you'll always have a reminder to do this process.
If you use a PAA, set up a sheet of "repeating events" that is reviewed at the start of each month. Every time I load the next month's worth of page-per-day sheets, I go through the "repeating events" sheet and use it to mark the various goal steps in my calendar.
Summary
To achieve your long-term goals, you need to know what they are and work toward them.
If you don't write down your goals, you end up spinning your wheels or depending on luck.
Goals should be measurable: they need a tangible result or numeric measurement that, for example, someone else could check.
Goals should have deadlines: knowing when a goal should be achieved helps set the pace.
Begin by listing your one-month, one-year, and five-year goals for work and your life. Prioritize them. List steps required to achieve these goals. Sprinkle the next step of each goal into future to do lists. Once a month, review the goals and steps, reprioritize if needed, and sprinkle more "next steps" into your to do lists.
Work the next steps as part of your regular to do list management. Gradually, each goal will be achieved or managed.
Revisit your goals regularly. Add new ones and eliminate old ones. Revise the steps accordingly.
Chapter 8. Prioritization
This is a "bottom up" chapter on setting priorities. First, I'll discuss something I alluded to in Chapter 5: techniques for prioritizing the tasks at hand—today's to do list . Then I'll cover prioritizing bigger things, such as projects. Lastly I'll talk about setting priorities for, or managing, your boss.
Figure 8-1.
Prioritizing Your To Do Lists
There you are at your desk facing today's daily to do list. Dozens of items. How do you decide what to do first?
This section is about prioritizing these items. Different situations call for different schemes. In previous chapters, we used a very simple scheme: if it has to be done today, it's an A priority; if it has to be done soon (but not today), it's a B priority; and everything else is a C priority.
"So what do you do if all your items are A priorities?"
Read this chapter.
Doing Tasks in List Order
System administrators frequently tell me they spend a lot of time each day fretting about what to do next. I know that when I stare at my to do list, I can spend five or more minutes just reading the list, obsessing over which should be the next item to work on. Total up all the time spent wasted that way, and it's a lot of time.
If you are wasting time fretting about what to do next, stop. Make the decision simple and just start at the top of the list and work your way down, doing each item in order. In the time you might spend fretting, you would complete a couple of the smaller items. In addition, because of the way you move items you couldn't complete to the following day, it's common for older items to bubble to the top of the list. Getting these older items done is a great way to start a day.
Tip
One of my chores as a kid was to take out the trash every Monday and Thursday night. I hated it. I would complain and procrastinate and make all sorts of trouble trying to get out of the task. (I think I complained just because that's what kids do when faced with chores.) Though our house was a big, three-story Victorian, it couldn't have taken me more than 10 minutes to empty all the wastebaskets. But what was the fun in that? I had enough delay tactics to waste at least a half-hour before I even got started! There are many situations where just doing the task takes much less time than the efforts we make to avoid the work.
Doing your to do items in the order they appear is a great way to avoid procrastination. To quote the Nike slogan, "Just do it."
If your list is short enough that you can do all the items in one day, then this scheme makes even more sense. If it doesn't matter if a task gets done early in the day or late in the day, who cares in what order it's completed?
This is very much like network congestion. If a network is lightly loaded it's easy to do audio, video, telephony, or other time-critical services. However, with a congested network, these services work a lot better with some kind of sophisticated prioritization scheme, or quality of service (QoS) system. When the network load is light, any scheme will work. When the network load is heavy, we need something more structured. When our task list is simple, any prioritization scheme will work. When we are flooded with requests, we need something more sophisticated.
To extend my analogy a little further, did you know that QoS often isn't about treating some packets better? It's really about treating some packets worse! Technically, what's going on inside a QoS switch is very interesting. When there is no congestion, it operates the same as a non-QoS switch. Packets come in, packets go out. However, when congestion happens, a non-QoS switch simply drops the most recently arrived packet. In other words, there's no buffer space left for a new packet, so it ignores that packet. A QoS-enabled switch handles congestion differently. When the buffer is full, it doesn't drop the newly arrived packet; instead, it picks a lower-priority packet in the "middle" of the buffer to drop. In other words, when you pay an ISP for better QoS on certain traffic, you are really paying to not be dropped during congestion. You are literally bribing the ISP to drop someone else's packet when the network is congested!
Task prioritization is similar. We have a finite amount of time and resources. When we are overloaded, we have a tendency to growl at the next new request we get. In reality, we need a way to look at our current task list and decide if there are lower-priority items to delay or possibly drop. (Sadly, we can't take bribes!)