Intermediate Goals

If you missed the past two blog posts, now would be a great time to check them out: Long-Term Goals and Short-Term Goals.

Last week, I mentioned aligning your short-term goals with your long-term goals to be most effective. This is not always as easy as it sounds. Many of us have grand visions of what our lives will look like 10 or 20 years from now but it is hard to figure out what our daily actions need to be to make that happen. Even if we know what daily actions lead to our long-term success the miniscule progress made each day leaves us unmotivated.

The difficulty in transcribing our life vision down to daily actions is precisely why most people don’t accomplish goals. How do most people get over this hurdle to accomplish life-long goals? Setting effective goals in between the long and short-term. These intermediate goals allow you to make connections that keep motivation and progress towards your goals.

Getting a college degree is a great example of intermediate goals that are structured for the student. Spending 4 or 5 years towards a degree can be overwhelming and how are you supposed to know what to do everyday? Dismantling a degree down to classes gives the student an intermediate goal to achieve along the way to a degree. Now, instead of a whole college education to think about, you can only have to think about one class. Breaking that down into short-term goals and daily actions is easy because you know what chapters to read, what papers to write and when tests will be given. This structure is perfect and teaches students how to achieve their academic goals. This framework also works from the professor’s point of view. There is a defined list of skills and knowledge a student must have to graduate and those are broken down into specific classes. The professor then takes the objectives in the class and can break them up into units, thus knowing what to teach each week.

The methodology of using intermediate goals is also applied outside of academia. Successful individuals and businesses use this process to outline projects and goals to reach their objectives. Do you use it in your life or business?

Connecting your daily activities, short-term goals, and long-term goals is vital to leading a life of success.

Think about your long-term goals and vision for your life. Break that vision down into intermediate steps that can be translated into daily actions to reach success.

Do you need help gaining a perspective and transcribing your goals from long-term to short-term? Reach out to me for a free phone call or email consultation. phil@philklutts.com