7.2. Setting GoalsHow to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (Signet) is a classic book on time management. The book brings out the necessity of listing your short-, medium-, and long-term goals, and encourages you to categorize them into A, B, and C priorities, with A being the highest priority. Let's do just that. Take a big sheet of paper and divide it into six sections, as shown in Figure 7-1 (people with lots of goals or large handwriting might want to use multiple sheets of paper). Figure 7-1. Goal planning sheetYou're going to fill in each box with a list of life goals in that category. You can add additional timeframes if you feel your goals are grouped differently. Now spend some time listing your goals. To help you get started, here are some guidelines:
Don't worry about their order or whether your goals are good enough for anyone else to see. Just list them. I'll wait. Really. I'll wait. Don't continue to the next paragraph until you've completed your chart. Not in your head, but on real paper. You didn't list them did you? You figured you'd come back to this chapter some other time and fill out the table. All the exercises in this book have one thing in common: they don't work unless you do them. So now pull out a sheet of paper and start writing! I'll wait.... Really.... Are you back? Good. Now go back and make sure each goal is measurable. Could another person examine the situation and determine that the goal has been met? Can you use numbers or tangible results as evidence of completion? Review your list now and make sure. Again, I'll wait. Next, for each goal, work out which are As, which are Bs, and which are Cs. As you absolutely must do, Bs are the next most important, and Cs are the good ideas or "would be nice" items that are low priority. This is similar to the priority scheme used in Chapter 4. Go mark them now. I can't stress enough the importance of doing these exercises as you come across them. That wasn't as easy as you thought, was it? Did you want to mark everything with an A? I know I did. Prioritization can take as long as, or longer, than writing the initial list.
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