How To Create Goals That You Can Accomplish

How To Create Goals That You Can Accomplish 

By: Stacey Ishman, MD, MPH, FAAP, FACS, HCQM

Recently I have been obsessed with how to be as effective as possible in my clinical and business efforts without giving up my hard-earned free time. Towards this aim, I focused my organization (and last post) on strategies to categorize your to-do list, prioritize your most important tasks, focus on impactful work, and eliminate low-value activities (found here in my post).

However, all this assumes that you understand what your WHY or vision is that is driving your decisions to prioritize your time. If this is clear to you, that is great and makes prioritizing easier. If it is NOT clear to you, sometimes you have to take a step back from the endless to-do list and focus on WHAT you want to accomplish and WHY it is important to you. 

For me, this year I decided I was going to aim for abundance. I want to feel like I have the time to accomplish my goals, that I have the resources and money to take care of my family, that I can manage my patients without feeling rushed, and that I can enjoy the education to grow new coaching (and real estate) businesses. 

When you are stepping back, I recommend that you take a few minutes to ask yourself at the 50,000 foot level, what is your primary motivation and what do you want to and need to accomplish in order to make this happen. 

Once you have these overarching plans in mind, setting up Goals That You Can Accomplish is incredibly helpful. I have found the book The 12 Week Year to be very useful in this regard. The approach I am recommending here is based on their guidance. 

Many people have heard of SMART goals which are a great starting place for goal setting. This framework recommends that goals be:

• Specific
• Measurable 
• Attainable 
• Relevant (to your overarching aims/vision)
• Time-Bound

A good example of a SMART goal might look like this. 

• I will create my Medical Mentor Coaching website in the next 4 weeks which includes a home page, an about page, a place for my blog, and at least one free handout for people who sign up for my email list. 

The additional guidance for these goals includes:

• Framing your goals in the positive 
• One example might be “I will finish 2 abstracts to be submitted by x date” instead of a goal to avoid missing meeting abstract deadlines. 
• Make sure that your goals require you to stretch but are realistic
• If you can attain your goals without any real effort or difficulty, you are probably aiming too low and wasting your time getting to your vision
• But be realistic, if you have not submitted a paper in a year, putting out 10 this year may not be realistic and won’t motivate you to get the first or second one written or published
• Determine accountability
• While your goals will be driven by you, there may be others who need to accomplish part or all of the tasks to help you get to your vision
• However, this does not mean that you are absolved of the need to drive things forward - you may need to instruct others on a timeline or remind your statistician of the deadlines for the abstract so that you can both be successful

• Set deadlines
• The likelihood of a task getting completed is much higher if a specific date (and sometimes time) is set to get it accomplished
• And, setting interim deadlines can be very useful to get to your endgoal accomplished without a last minute rush right before a deadline - this is especially useful for large projects with multiple people contributing to the final product. 
• If you work with teams, setting the timeline as a group may also help everyone understand how their work impacts others and motivate them to get things done!

I have found that by focusing on attainable goals that are designed to get me to my big Vision (my WHY), it is much easier to figure out which tasks I need to focus on first and which I can eliminate all together. These GOAL strategies have also led me to feel a greater feeling of accomplishment as I check things off the list. 

I hope these tips allow you to create goals that you can accomplish in your work and home life so that you feel successful and HAPPY!