Be effing SMART
- By Alex Moseley
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- 27 Mar, 2018
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Productivity - self-sabotage - and the need for Focus
The famous business SMART targets are great:
SPECIFIC
MEASURABLE
ACHIEVABLE
REALISTIC / RELEVANT
TIMING
Most business people and high achievers know the SMART targets and many others who are not immersed in the world of self-development may have encountered them at one time or another in a work seminar or professional development course.
I often use them with young clients to sharpen their ambitions. "What are you planning to do this week?"
"Revision."
"That's not specific. So, what exactly are you going to revise?"
"Physics."
"Good. Now, when are you going to this?"
"Sometime this week?"
"That's vague on timing."What days?"
"Monday and Thursday."
"What times ..."
And so it can proceed.
Each "thing to do" needs to be specific rather than vague. "I'll save money" becomes "I'll save 5% of my monthly earnings or £150." Vagueness serves as a protection. If we don't save much or don't complete our revision or project, we're not really guilty of doing anything wrong are we? But if we don't hit a specific target, we're feel a sense of guilt - we have let ourselves down. That's why we often don't want to be cornered into being specific about what we want.
The measurable is implied in the amount to be saved as a percentage (which is a better standard to use) or a specific amount. For revision it can be "I'll revise 6 pages from the text book." Providing a measure by which to judge our success is important here: at the end of a few months, am I saving 5%? At the end of the week, did I complete the 6 pages? Again, when we don't hit the target, we may feel guilty - but more importantly, we begin to create a habit of not attaining our goals. We become used to that and the feeling of guilt we may have once born diminishes into a passivity of not really achieving much at all.
Attainable relates to whether it is achievable or not - saying "I'll save £500 a month" when my income is only £800 may have a huge impact on my budget, or "revising for all my exams this week" is of the same quality.
In a sense, when we don't think about whether something is achievable or not, we are setting ourselves up for a failure. Such self-sabotage is common - we're probably all guilty of some it daily or habitually - hence, when we create a goal for a project, we need to consider what belief systems we are creating around it.
Realistic targets overlap with achievable but relate more to the bigger picture or context. Doing 6 pages of revision may be a very reasonable target by itself, but if the week is crammed full of appointments and other pressing projects, its realism diminishes. Similarly if saving 5% is a goal but in the next month we're just about to put down a deposit for a car or a house, then the goal is not realistic - right now. Then there's also the reality of our person: as a fit person, I could say I have good stamina and strength, but I would not realistically hope to swim the English Channel (22 miles) next month. In a year with training would make more sense, but for now it's just not realistic.
A distracting problem with realistic is that it also relates to how we or our goals are perceived by other people we know.
Again and again I hear stories of people not even trying for their goals because other people
say that they are not realistic. We have to learn and then accept that that is other people's perception though - usually of their own lives and abilities! If the great achievers of life (at all levels, known and unknown) listened to the dream-stealers and nay-sayers, not much would be achieved. We sometimes turn to other people we know for advice on what is effectively realistic for us - who we turn to is important. People like myself will sit down with you and pencil out a sketch of how to achieve it, relaying questions and answers back and forth to get a sense of how SMART the goals are. Others though will damn the goal before you've taken a single step towards it. Be careful who you share your dreams with.
Finally, Timing comes into everything we do. Without a time frame, we are lost - we're on an ocean heading towards a goal - but if we don't review when we expect to achieve our goal and how we are faring, we are likely to become disenchanted and lose interest. It's easily done in a distracting world. But keeping a check on progress and breaking down the overall project into smaller bits or building up to target by certain dates, helps us keep motivated.
So we can be SMART - simple enough.
But we also need to be Focussed - hence the "eft-ing SMART" in the title. When we lose track of what we're doing, of what we're achieving (or not), then our focus diminishes and the whole SMART project or goal disintegrates. Daily we need to remind ourselves of our focus - what our purpose and passions, why we're doing what we're doing and why we need to keep on top of the SMART review of our project.
Being focused, may mean removing the distractions around us, which are so common in modern life. But it may also mean reviewing our diet and sleeping habits, as well as potentially the lack of respect of the show for our workplace. It is difficult to remain focused for very long, it requires discipline, which is easily exhausted by effort. Imagine lifting some dumbbells five times, 10 times, 20 times, whatever the weight after a while the muscle is well will begin to tire. Focus in short bursts, with minor breaks, and then we become more efficient.
We are often wrong in what we believe, and we are often wrong and what we think would happen when we take action, and they are often wrong and in our reactions to the world around us.
Yes if we do not allow ourselves the right to be ignorant, to be wrong, to fail at what we seek to achieve, then we are effectively challenging ourselves mentally and physically. And believing that the world is as it is, or that a certain belief system is correct regardless of alternative perceptions or even facts, believing, that is, in our own infallibility, despite the evidence of thousands of years of human error, arrogance, hubris, and failure, we certainly constrain our minds and our bodies therefore to shackles.
It is that's practically a duty for the critically Thoughtful to read widely and to read books that outside our normal academic jurisdiction or pleasure reading. We need to challenge our brains with arguments, imagination, evidence, and believes that challenge how we View the world we live in, our selves, and other people.
Much is to be enjoyed in the realm of literature, which introduces us to characters and character traits that we may recognise but not fully understand. But much is also to be gained from picking up books that would normally not attract us. And once we challenge our minds, we mature mentally if we review them honestly and openly the thoughts and theories presented to us, and compare them to what we know, and especially to challenge our own prejudices about what is, or what we think is the case.
If we walk around thinking that we know all that is needed to know, we will finally and sadly find ourselves grossly mistaken. That is the history of the human adventure into the realms of our world and of science and philosophy. There will always be an alternative perspective. We need to train our minds to be accepting of alternative views, and respectful of the people who believe in them. If we truly think that they are reasoning wrongly, then we may be able to find common ground from which we both may learn. It is a fallacy to reject everything that a so-called enemy, whether a literal enemy or an academic enemy, has to say. Humility begins when we admit that we may be wrong.