6 Steps to Mapping Your Goals

by Phil Gerbyshak on October 15th, 2008

Note: This is a guest post from @Stephen, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbb_stephen. Have you ever decided to take a long weekend and go on a road-trip? Perhaps there is a nice bed-and-breakfast just a few hours from home where you can get away from it all and recharge your batteries. The problem is that you’ve never been there before so you don’t know the way. What do you do? The answer, of course, is that you get a map. Whether you use MapQuest or Google all you have to do is punch in your starting and ending points and ‘Voila!’, detailed, turn-by-turn directions telling you exactly how to get from where you are to where you want to be. It’s just a short trip, over a long weekend, but you would still put some planning into it, wouldn’t you?

Do you map out your direction for your career/work/life goals?

Many, many people do not, but they should. If you don’t have a map you may never get to where you want to be. You’ll just wander in the wilderness. Plotting out a roadmap, or making a plan, toward achieving your goals makes it possible to:

Organize your time and resources for personal/professional development
Overcome obstacles at work in product or service delivery
Generate new ideas for targeting new markets
Identify solutions to developing threats to your business
Take advantage of new business opportunities

What are your intentions, young man? (or woman)

You may have heard the expression, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” I have, and I believe it. I have met a lot of people working in jobs that they never intended to have, careers that they never intended to pursue. In fact, these folks had every intention of pursuing some other goals but somehow things kept getting in the way. “Life happens,” as the saying goes. Or does it? Lose sight of your goals and before you know it, 5 or 10 years go by, and it’s too late. Or is it?

It is (almost) never too late

Pick one goal you have ignored, one project languishing on the back burner, or perhaps one item from your “Someday/Maybe” list - one thing that you could reasonably accomplish in the near future. You know, one of those things you’ve been meaning to work on when you get a little extra time. Let’s go ahead and set up a new pattern, a new way of looking at your goals so that you can work steadily at achieving them.

Write down your goal
Write down what the successful conclusion is
Make a list of the action steps needed to accomplish the goal, on 3×5 cards
Estimate the amount of time needed for each action step and write it on the cards
Organize the cards into chronological order for completion
Get out your planner and schedule appointments with yourself to work on each step

Look at that. You have just created a map, a plan, for guiding your activities to complete one of your goals! All you have to do now is get in the habit of doing this with all of your goals, all of your projects. Pretty soon it will be second nature and you will be well on your way to getting more done than you could have imagined before you started making your maps.

All images courtesy of Stephen Smith at Business Development in Context

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