Author Archives: David Hollingworth

Beyond SMART Goals

You know, making goals SMART doesn’t make them happen. A great deal more effort needs to be put in before a SMART goal becomes a realized goal. However there are some things you can do to bolster your SMART goals and shorten the odds that you’ll achieve them.

  1. Compelling Reasons. What are the compelling reasons for you to complete this goal? Write them down! If you’re struggling to think of some compelling reasons then take a step back and ask yourself, “Why am I committing to this goal if I can’t think of any compelling reasons to do it?”.
  2. Additional Benefits. Under this heading list all the additional benefits you’ll accrue by achieving this goal. For example the additional benefits for my weight loss goal would include:
    • More of my clothes will fit
    • I’ll have more energy
    • It will ease my hiatus hernia

    to name but a few.

  3. Challenges To Be Overcome. Get these out on the table right up front, don’t let them lurk in the background waiting to leap out and trip you up. By identifying the challenges up front you might recognize early on that extra steps will be required to get you to your goal and you can plan for these now.
  4. Resources You’ll Need. Again identifying the resources you’ll need to accomplish your goal as early as possible will give you the opportunity to build these into the plan and avoid nasty surprises later.

This upfront planning is well worth the effort. It helps integrate the goal into your subconscious and identifies things early on that might otherwise knock you off course. By getting a grip on them now it will boost your confidence in your ability to achieve that goal.

The "A" in SMART

You’ll probably know by now that the “A” in “SMART goals” stands for Attainable. In other words a goal must be attainable for it to be worth pursuing.

The examples I gave of unattainable goals were things like taking lunch on Pluto or becoming the next king of England. These were deliberately extreme examples; but when we get closer to home where do we draw the line between what’s an attainable goal and what isn’t. If we decide a goal isn’t attainable then are we just making excuses and holding ourselves back?

Let me give you another example. Suppose you’re a high level executive and you’re considering setting a goal; “Become a CEO within 12 months”.

  • Specific – yes,
  • Measurable – yes
  • Attainable – I’ll come back to this
  • Relevant – yes
  • Timely – yes

So that just leaves attainable. At first you think this goal is relatively easily attainable; until you realize that it will take you away from your wife and young family who need your support. Eventually you come to the conclusion that this goal isn’t attainable because of family pressures.

My argument here is that this goal, and many like it, are attainable if we’re willing to pay the price. The price in this case is spending time away from the family.

In fact almost any goal, even the daft ones I mentioned above, are attainable if you’re prepared to pay the price.

So where does that leave us when trying to assess attainable goals? We need to decide:

  1. How badly we want the goal
  2. What the price will be of attaining the goal
  3. Are we willing to pay that price?

If we are willing to pay the price for attaining the goal then we must recognize that this is our choice! If we’re not willing to pay the price to attain our goal then, again, this is our choice. In exercising those choices we are empowered to shape our own future.

Choose What To Do

A recent article from Mark Forster came up with a useful idea for those of us who tend to get distracted away from the items on our to-do list by other less productive pursuits.

Mark suggested that rather than use a time log, to record everything we’ve done; use an “event log” to record everything we’re about to do.

What advantages does this have over a time log? Basically if you have to stop for a second and write down what you’re about to do before you do it then you have to make an active choice as to what it is you’re going to do. So when I complete this posting I might write down:

21:57 – surf on over to gamestar

and I must just stop and think, “Hang on, I still need to sort out the laundry. Gamestar will have to wait”.

You get the idea? I’ve made an active choice as to what I’m going to do rather than just let the fancy take me where it will.

In the next day or so I’m going to give this a try and I’ll report back how I got on.

The Little Steps

I was listening to the radio this evening, with it being Saturday the football results from the UK were on and I heard one of the commentators refer to the “gigantic step” one of the clubs had taken today.

That got me thinking. You know we all expect instantaneous results these days. Look at the Internet, instant information, instant purchasing power. We want to buy something, we don’t have to save for years we can get instant credit. Heck, even my porridge is instant these days!

We live in a world were we want it and we can get it now. Or do we? If we have a goal then our underlying belief maybe that this too should be instantly attainable and when it’s not we may loose heart, loose focus, loose direction. However we have to remember that it’s the little steps that take us steadily forwards and that will eventually lead us to our goal. Those little steps that we take every day are the ones that will eventually lead us to success.

That gigantic step the club took was a gigantic step out of the relegation zone. Perhaps if they’d been taking little steps all season they’d not have been in the relegation zone today.

The Journal Reviewed

The Journal is an excellent tool for recording just about anything you might want to refer to in the future. Use it as a traditional journal or to keep notes, recipes, addresses, anything. Then find the information using comprehensive tagging or search facilities. A very versatile tool.

Review of The Journal
Rated as 5/5 on May 12 2007 by David Hollingworth

5/5

I’ve been using The Journal from DavidRM Software for many years, so many years ago that I can’t recall the original reason for downloading it. Since then it’s become a true companion with a wide variety of uses.

The Journal has two main layouts. Firstly there’s the traditional calendar based journal which you can configure to create entries as page per day, a page per week, a page per month or, in fact, just about any date range you can think of.

For example one of my main uses for The Journal is as a weather almanac. In here I have three calendar journal categories. First journal has daily entries as a brief summary of the weather each day. Secondly I have a weekly category that has one entry for every week starting on a Saturday. Finally I have a category for the monthly climate reports that creates an entry on the first of every month.

As well as the calendar based entries The Journal also has looseleaf entries that can be used for general note taking or, in fact, to record any information that isn’t particularly date related. These entries can also have sub-entries to create a nested structure for organizing your information.

The Journal comes with a host of additional features. These include:

  • Stop watch & count down timer for timed writing exercises
  • Colour coded ‘topics’ for categorizing and filtering information
  • Posting direct from The Journal to a number of popular blog engines
  • Full rich text entry into the journal with ability to create your own format styles
  • Spell checker and thesaurus
  • Full search capabilities
  • Set events, tasks, appointments in the calendar and get pop up reminders

The list is pretty much endless so I suggest you go try The Journal for yourself. You get a huge 45 day trial period and the eventual purchase cost is very low.

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Be Careful What You Wish For

After all this talk about loosing weight last weekend I contracted a virus that had some unpleasant gastric side effects. This is the reason the blog has been so quiet this week.

I’ve not weighed myself yet; but I’ll be darned disappointed if I get on the scale tomorrow and I haven’t lost anything at all. Mrs. H commented this afternoon that if I lost any more weight of my face I’d look dead! Nice!

Now I’m not really suggesting that my desire to loose weight triggered the earlier unpleasantness; but there is still something to be said for being careful how we envision our desires and goals. For one thing the sub-conscious doesn’t understand the word “not”. So if you say, “I will not smoke”, all that gets through is the, “will smoke”. Not the desired effect at all. It’s far better to say something like, “My life is free from the need for cigarettes”.

Feedback Loop

Here’s something I learned today;

That if something goes wrong it’s not a failure – it’s feedback!

When I read that I thought, WOW! That’s a revolutionary way of looking at what’s happening in my life. If I’m not progressing in the way that I want to then it’s not a failure it’s feedback.

What do we do with feedback?

Feedback is called feedback because it feeds back into the system and modifies it so that the situation that produced the feedback doesn’t happen again (in the case of negative feedback) or does happen again in the case of positive feedback.

This morning I got on the scales again, it being Saturday which is weigh day in our house. Well I was disappointed at first to find that my weight was exactly the same as last week and the week before.

Then I thought, “Hand on! This is feedback, not failure! The feedback is that I haven’t modified my behavior enough to start loosing the weight. I must make more effort to start the weight loss process”. Which is a much more positive slant on the situation.

Missions and Values

Recently I wrote about the importance of making goals SMART and that the R meant Relevant. For example my walking goal is relevant to my goal to loose weight whereas a goal to buy a new car isn’t (currently) relevant to any of my other goals. Hence it’s not on my goals list at all (currently).

But what about those “life” goals, the top level goals like; “own a house by the sea”, or even, “loose 23lbs weight by Christmas”. What must these goals be relevant too in order that we buy into them?

The answer is that our top level goals must be relevant to our mission and our values. In fact these two items provide the context for all our goal setting so it’s important that we understand what our mission is and what our values are.

Our mission and values are the things that drive us, the reason why we get out of bed in the morning, the things we are passionate about. They define us as a person and state what we stand up for and, by writing them down, we can look at them and say, “Yes! This is me, this is what I care about”.

Stating them in writing also gives us a clearer picture of the framework in which we’re setting our goals. Our mission and values set the boundaries for our goals and gives us an opportunity to see the big picture. How are our goals contributing to our mission? Do our goals fit with our values?

Finally here’s my personal mission statement as an example:

To be a creative and compassionate person. To achieve self-fulfillment through the pursuit of understanding, the love of my family and the respect of all. To have control of my own destiny through acknowledging that the causes I make today shape my future. To maintain a healthy and emotionally balanced lifestyle between self, family and work. I will maintain my family and my self through my efforts to help others to expand their lives and reach their goals.

To Do More, Do Less

It’s the age old adage; the less, the more. But how do you do less to do more?

One habit that I have adopted recently, both at work and at home, has helped me to do just that – I’m doing more by doing less.

What am I talking about? Email! If you let it email will simply gobble up tonnes and tonnes of your time as it used to do for me.

Ask yourself this question, “Do you use email to hold a conversation”? In other words do you respond to an email as soon as it arrives and when you get a reply to that you reply again, just like a verbal conversation? If you do then you’re probably wasting lots of time in your use of email.

If you’re doing the email conversation thing back and forth then your productivity will go way down. Have you ever timed how long it takes to type something rather than say it to some one? No? Let’s try a little experiment. Here’s a typical sentence I might include in an email conversation at work:

“The platform you are trying to install on is not supported at that release. You will have to manually hack the configuration file and re run the install”

That took me 47 seconds to type and correct a misspelled word. Now let me say it…

8.7 seconds later I’ve given over exactly the same piece of information. That’s just over five times faster than writing the same thing in an email!

So here’s my tips for improving your email productivity.

  • Switch off the email notification. This only serves to distract you from what you’re doing productively and makes you the slave of your email client when it should be the other way around.
  • Process email in a batch three times a day; first thing in the morning, just after lunch and again about an hour before you finish up. Often I find people come up with the solution themselves before I have time to reply to their email, which is empowering for them and saves me the time looking it up and responding.
  • Don’t process email just as you’re finishing – if there’s any unpleasant surprises in your email you’ll worry about them all night when you can’t do anything about it until the following morning.
  • Work down the emails from the most recent towards the oldest. If there’s been much activity in an email thread then the most recent email will have all the information you need and you can delete the rest.
  • Don’t use email as a conversation tool, it’s a very inefficient way of speaking. Use your email to request information and to send information; but use the telephone to hold a conversation.

So do less emailing, do more real stuff.

PS. Instant Messaging is even worse. Avoid it like the plague!

Book Review: Getting Things Done by David Allen

After a few years implementing the ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) methodology by picking bits up here, there and everywhere online I thought it was high time I bought and read David Allen’s quintessential volume on personal productivity.

I thought there might be some snippets in the book that I’d not picked up before. I was not disappointed.

The book contains a huge wealth of information about implementing a GTD process for managing your (my) life, from the big picture down to handling the details.

From the stuff I’d read online I did think the book would take me on a minimalist crusade and have me setting up a productivity system using index cards, rubber bands and spring clips. This was not the case. Whilst Allen does mention the relative merits of electronic and low-tech tools the book seems to go out of it’s way to avoid discussing any particular method of implementing GTD. At points this might leave the reader wondering, “Just how to I do this in practice”, though in general the examples and suggestions are sufficient to allow the imagination to reach it’s own conclusions on how a particular chapter might be realized.

The book is divided into three main sections. The first deals with an overview of the concepts that lead to the GTD methodology. It introduces the reader to the idea that you can get your life and all its inputs under control. One of the most useful chapters for me was on planning projects. This was information I felt was missing from other productivity books I’ve read recently that seemed to be more focused on the tasks. Here Allen was encompassing the big picture too in a way the feeds directly into a GTD system.

The second sections is a step by step process for setting up your trusted GTD system. Here again I discovered a lot about the GTD system. One of the big things for me was the importance of creating a trusted filing system that’s simple and fun to use. This is an area of my life that is currently total chaos and is desperately in need of a make over. As well as the practical aspects of this system Allen reinforces the idea of getting all the open loops out of your head and into a ‘trusted system’ in order to free up the mind to be more receptive and creative.

The final part of the book revisits some of the concepts introduced during the practical sections earlier in order to reinforce the power of the simple constructs. So there are chapters on the power of the Collection Habit, Next Actions and Outcome Focusing that look deeper and the reasons why these practices work so well.

There’s so much in this book that I know it demands at least another reading, if not more. A full blown GTD system may not be for everybody; but I think that anybody who has more than a few tasks or projects to organize would be better off using a trusted system to manage the tasks than relying on the vagaries of memory alone. I certainly am.

I give this book five stars: * * * * *