Planning to succeed

This is the second column in the three years I've been writing for the News & Record that was deemed not-quite-right for the editorial pages. I'll take those odds.

I began this year with a column about how my husband, Rob, and I abandoned New Year’s resolutions in favor of a roadmap of goals, both professional and personal, to guide us through 2007. As I predicted in the column, we did not achieve the many goals we entered into our ridiculously elaborate Microsoft Project flowchart, both because we were overly ambitious in some areas, and because other areas became less interesting to us as the year wore on.

But the very act of creating the roadmap was enough to make this a year of unprecedented growth and achievement for both of us.

Mind you, we won no awards this year and we didn’t make our first million. But we did finish painting the interior of our house and delve much more deeply into our individual creative endeavors and even lost a little weight.

Rob and I are now looking forward to another New Year’s Eve brainstorming session to outline our hopes for 2008, which we plan to execute with a couple of minor modifications to our system.

First, I’m done with Microsoft Project. While a truly useful piece of software, it’s overly elaborate for our needs and I have neither the expertise to fully utilize it nor the desire to garner that expertise. Most likely, we’ll use OneNote which organizes information intuitively and will allow us to drop in any relevant digital materials, everything from Web pages to photo thumbnails, sketches and documents created in other programs.

We are also updating our check-in system. For the first few months of ’07, we sat down in front of our full Project flowchart each week to note any progress we made. But continuously seeing these lofty goals became overwhelming and our meetings petered out.

This year, we are borrowing an idea from our friend and colleague, Tamara McLendon, who has created an accountability system. Each week, Tamara identifies personal and professional micro-goals. For example, instead of the macro-goal of engaging X number of new clients over the course of the year, Tamara will commit to two networking meetings that week. Additionally, Tamara associates a pain, as she puts it, to failing to complete her weekly goals, which generally involves taking away something she wants, like an afternoon of reading at a coffee shop.

Like macro-goals, micro-goals should be achievable while also being ambitious enough to be challenging. Micro-goals should contribute to macro-goals, even if in incremental ways, and be specific enough to act as a guideline. So, for example, if one of my macro-goals is to keep my house tidier, then a weekly micro-goal of doing at least 30 minutes of housework five days a week is not only appropriately strenuous yet achievable, but its specificity will ensure that cleaning is a continuous and easy process; otherwise, I will procrastinate until I’m forced to do all 2 ½ hours of cleaning the night before my accountability meeting, or, more likely, simply fail to achieve that goal and be subject to the consequence du jour.

I must close with a word of warning: While a little self-imposed pressure can be just the thing to turn an aspiration into action, pushing yourself too hard can lead to overwhelmed inaction with the potential to derail aspirations for good.

As the neighborhood parent who occasionally drove me to elementary school would say, “Work hard and play hard.” Life’s too short not to aggressively pursue dreams, but it would be a mighty shame if those dreams became chores in the process.