5 Essential Skills for Momentum: #2 Set Clear Goals

Here we’re coming at you with the next of the five essential skills for your best work for the projects you’re planning with Momentum. 

As mentioned in that first five essential skills post, most of the skills in question focus on planning and taking ideas from start to finish. 

There's only one drawback — you’ll have to choose which one you choose to practice and build proficiency with first. Part of Momentum planning is knowing you can’t do everything at the same time; your reach will always exceed your grasp. 

We have a limited number of seconds on this earth and a limited amount of things we can push forward. But look at it differently: limitations are gifts. 

Our limits help us choose where to direct our time, energy, and attention in order to do best work on only those ideas worth listening to.

Skill #2: Set Clear Goals

While visualization, the first essential skill, gives substance to a fuzzy future, articulating your goals builds on your dreams… acting much like a pair of glasses.

Clear goals give you the steps needed to bring that future reality into focus. Articulating your goals is similar to goal-setting. But the aim here isn’t to set an end goal only. 

We want to speak and talk through our goals so clearly, that we’re speaking them into reality. When you’ve described them properly, you’ll be able to know as you go when a specific leg of the journey is complete.

In Momentum Planning, we set clear goals by using our own version of SMART goals: Simple, Meaningful, Actionable, Realistic, and Trackable.

1. SIMPLE. When you can look at a simple goal, it’s clear what its completion would look like.
2. MEANINGFUL. You can look at the goal and immediately understand the importance of completing it.
3. ACTIONABLE. You see the goal and are immediately clear on what needs to be done to accomplish it.
4. REALISTIC. The endpoint is achievable with the resources you have available.
5. TRACKABLE. It’s clear what progress with the goal means, and the goal’s progress can be tracked quantitatively or qualitatively.

We use the SMART framework because it gives us goals that direct our attention and efforts. We recommend you use it, too, because of two major benefits. 

One, the framework ensures you seriously consider the commitments you’re making to yourself. Two, it expresses your goals in ways that help you complete them.