The Role of Goals

by Edward R. Dayton

Everyone has goals, though not everyone is able to state what they are. In one sense, to have no goal is a goal in itself.

Managing your time has to begin with goals. How you use time must always be allotted and appraised in relation to goals, and if managing your time is managing your life, then the place to begin is with your life goals.

The first step to good time management is to think through and write down what you want to be or do in your lifetime. Pretend that you died 15 years from now, and write your own obituary. What would you like it to say? For what would you like to have been remembered at the end of the next 15 years? When your biography is written, what would you like to find? Allen Lakein suggests that we ask, €œHow would you like to spend the next five years? € Not how will you or should you but how would you like to? If one of your lifetime goals is to manage or lead a large enterprise, and you discover you would like to spend the next five years painting, there is an obvious discrepancy. We need to distinguish those things that others may have (perhaps falsely) taught us should be our goals from those that God has in mind and teaches us really to want for ourselves.

For a goal to be useful in time management, however, we have to know when we have reached it or accomplished it (or failed to!). A goal has to be accomplishable and measurable. When we say accomplishable, we mean realistic, something that we have the faith to believe we can accomplish. When we say measurable, we mean be specific: when will it happen, and how will we know that it did? Can we summarize it in terms of a past event? The goal €œto have a large crowd at the Saturday evening meeting € is no goal at all. One person €™s multitude is another person €™s handful of people.

It €™s important to see that all goals are interrelated. Each event must take its place in the larger stream of things. If one of your purposes is to be an effective executive in your organization or an effective mother to your family, then there are certain steps that need to be taken to accomplish these things. These €œsteps € have become sub goals toward your higher goal or purpose. Expressed as €œevents € specific as to time and content, measurable and accomplishable, they may become the markers of the way to our life goals.

Goals must not be thought of as swords that dangle over our heads, nor need we be afraid to set goals for fear of failure. None of us can accurately know what the future holds, but images of what the future should and could be like are powerful motivations.

Goals come in all types and sizes. It €™s useful to see that some goals reflect what we want to be, and others reflect what we want to do.

The best goals relate to our attributes such as loving kindness, righteousness and honesty. They also reflect our position, such as mother, businessman, worker. In one sense these goals are only measurable by our own standards. Objectively, they are measured by what we do about them. Therefore, they are worked out by €œdo goals. €

€œDo goals € are the things we want to accomplish or the actions we want to take.

Our many personal goals should never be seen as separated from one another. There is a great tendency in western society to put life in compartments. We talk about public life, private life, business life and so on. Such a view can be demoralizing. Life must be viewed as a whole. One €™s goals for one €™s business, one €™s €¦ service, one €™s family, one €™s friends must all be taken together. It is impossible to divide life (and time) into neat packages. What life is all about is people and people €™s needs and people €™s problems are all intertwined.

Make a short list of your lifetime goals and another one of your one-year goals. Put them on three-by-five cards and carry them with you. Regularly pull them out and review them. Can you account for your stewardship and time based on the list before you? If you can €™t, revise the list or revise your calendar!

Finally, remember that goal setting is a process. The world changes. Situations change. Our families change. We change. The primary purpose of setting goals is to set direction and to keep testing that direction against God €™s good will for us.