Setting Goals

Making Changes To Our Business Goal Setting Process

We changed our business goal setting process at the beginning of the year and I’m happy to report that it’s working well. Both of us get more done now so it did help our productivity and motivation a lot. Not everything has been sunshine and candy canes for these last couple of months though. I’m experimenting with a few more changes because I know we can do even better.

First, the list of tasks keeps growing and growing and growing until it’s overwhelming just looking at it. The bigger that list gets, the less I want to work on anything in it. So for this month I’m limiting it to the 4 absolute most important things we need to finish. Actually, it’s really the 4 most important groups of things. Doing that should, hopefully, help us stay even more focused on what’s important too. That ties in nicely with the 80/20 principle which is one of our tactics.

Second, our list of tasks might need more dates. I’ve noticed that I tend to push things out to the end of the week, because that’s when I do the most work, and the end of the month. That means I cram everything into the last two weekends and that’s bad news. Most of that behavior comes from the time required at my day job and the mental exhaustion after each workday. It still needs a solution though. One idea I had was making a 5 or 6 day schedule where everyday I work a little bit on something for one of the 4 groups of tasks. I might still try that in the future but, well, I really don’t like schedules. The freedom to mix things up or blow off a day more naturally fits how I work best when left on my own. I’m just adding end dates to a few things to see how that goes for now.

Since those are productivity related problems, I searched around and found a nice article called 15 Steps to a More Productive Workday that’s geared toward website designers and freelancers. I know there are other systems but I’m trying to keep things as simple and uncluttered as possible. The last thing I want is to get too bogged down in the process and lose the fun of working on my own.

What system do you use to set goals for your internet business and manage tasks?

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Never gets anything done when the to-do list gets too big.