Goal Setting Mistakes: 4. Moving Targets

This month I learned some goal setting lessons…the hard way! I’ve been working with setting goals and blogging about it for a couple of months now. And I made some mistakes. Preventable mistakes? Maybe, but honest mistakes anyway. This is a series of posts about those mistakes.

Mistake 4: Moving Targets

After all the earlier mistakes there’s the pitfall of the moving target. This happens when you set a goal to achieve something, but the end result isn’t entirely clear.

You start working on them enthusiastically, and while you work you get new insight and ideas. And they end up in the desired end result, consciously or subconsciously. There nothing really wrong with adjusting the desired goal as you go along, as long as you don’t lose sight of your original objective.

The phenomenon can be very demotivating. It’s like running a 5k race, only to find out that with every two steps you take, the finish line moves a step away. While you’re running this is not a big issue, but as soon as that finish line comes in sight (after running 7k!) … it’s not funny anymore.

Here’s the phenomenon in a first hand example.

Example: Get that garden done
The goal:

1. By December 2007 the garden in the front and back have been redone and are safe for children

The problem:
When I initially set this goal, I wanted to redo the garden for two reasons. It wasn’t safe for children and it wasn’t any fun for children.

The deadline was set for the end of the year, because I wanted to get it done before winter. Or rather, I wanted it to be ready for use in spring, because that would be the time that Jesse would walk and starts playing outside in the garden.

To have it ready by spring, the garden needs to be done before winter. During the winter you can’t really work in the garden anyway, and I wanted the new lawn to have strong roots before it gets abused in spring.

No problem so far actually. The goal is quantified, albeit a bit digital: it’s either done or not.

But while I was working on the garden, all kinds of ideas popped up in my mind. And I ended up adding them to the desired end result subconsciously. Which isn’t a bad thing necessarily, I know I want to have those features in the garden. But they weren’t part of the goal!

Two of these items, and they happen to be the ones that have yet to be conducted are:

• Planting two trees in the back of the garden.
• Moving the door in the fence to the other side of the garden

The trees need to come purely for cosmetic reasons, they need to block the view we have on an ugly building. And the door needs to move, so I can enter and leave the garden easily with my motorcycle. Two great ideas! But what do they have to do with making the garden safe for kids?

The solution:
In retrospect I can say that this goals has been completed for quite some weeks already. I still have little projects to do, but they weren’t part of the goal and I will do them anyway. The goal has been accomplished.

I could have prevented this if I would have lined out what the checkpoints were for the accomplishment of this goal. This could have been a list like this:

• Remove toxic plants from garden
• Remove big level differences, where kids can fall from heights to a hard floor
• Remove sharp objects, like nails and bushes with thorns
• Add a lawn where kids can play
• Add a sandbox with sand that’s safe for kids (and remains so by using a lid to prevent cats from ‘using’ it)

These would have been the “must-do’s” to accomplish this goal. Painting the fence wasn’t part of that list, it got done, but wasn’t necessary for accomplishing this goal. As are planting trees for cosmetic reasons and moving doors for transportation reasons.

Goal Setting Rules

So what are the lessons here?

1. Make a list of must-do’s for goals where the end-result is an idea or concept
2. It’s OK to do more than planned, as long as you at least do what you planned

This was the last article in the series. Well, for now anyway

Posted in counting beans on Mon 2007.12.10