Overcoming the Doritos Temptation and Other Obstacles to Achieving Your Goals

I have an idea, a goal, a dream. The problem is that sometimes I’m not so good at working towards my dream. And I’m not the only one, in fact this is a fairly common occurrence.

Most of us are really good at making New Year’s resolutions. We vow to lose weight, quit smoking, save money, and never ever again eat an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting. Sadly, less than 30 days later, most of us have given up, feeling like failures once again while we stare down that empty bag of chips on our lap.

So why do we fall into these patterns all over again? What keeps us from achieving our goals at work or at home?

Recently I've been giving a lot of thought about why this happens to us, or at least to me, and thought I’d share a couple of tips about how we can change those patterns and achieve our goals.

PROBLEM 1: GOALS

It’s not that goal setting is a bad thing in and of itself, it’s how we go about setting those goals that sets us up to fail right from the very beginning.

Last year I looked around my house at all the stacks of books, piles of paper and framed photos still yet to be hung and swore to Zeus that I would get organized. My intentions were good. I wrote it down, “I will be more organized in 2010!”… and lost my list of New Year’s resolutions somewhere in those aforementioned piles of paper.

What was my problem? Getting started on a big goal can be very daunting. You just don’t know where to start! This year it clicked for me. Instead of making huge, monolithic, lofty goals, I broke them down into small, easily attainable, bite sized bits, such as “clean off my dresser” and “take the trash out immediately instead of balancing debris precariously on the top”.

I carry this same process over when I have an overwhelming project at work. Breaking it down into smaller pieces makes it easier to achieve my goal. It’s also very rewarding each time you reach a smaller goal. Reward yourself with chocolate if need be! It certainly works for me.

So now that our goals are a more manageable size let’s talk about the great dream/idea/goal killer, perfectionism.

PROBLEM 2: PERFECTIONISM

I’ve taken a lot of art classes over the years. They were my favorite courses in college. I’d spend 2 to 3 hours a night churning out mediocre work and occasionally an almost masterpiece. That’s how art works, you make 1000 mistakes in order to learn your craft.

A fellow classmate of mine took the opposite approach. He began his first piece and painstakingly worked it over and over again, trying to capture absolute realism in his drawing. It was an amazing piece but he was never satisfied. He saw flaws where we, the rest of the class, saw style.

At the end of the quarter his frustration was palatable, you could almost taste it in the air, and no one wanted to work near him because his tension seemed to infect those who got too close. He had spent the entire quarter working on that one piece. After the last class was over and the work graded, I watched in horror as he ripped the paper from his tablet, balled up one of the most exquisite drawings I had ever seen and threw it into the trash as he stormed out of the room. His paralyzing fear of not being perfect had caused him to fail.

Perfectionism at work can be deadly especially when there is a deadline to meet and you need to collaborate as a team. For example, nitpicking a co-worker’s contribution to a project could cause delays in the project as well as a difficult working relationship in future collaborations. Sometimes 90% is good enough when there is a deadline involved.  The other 10% can be saved for version 2.0.

PROBLEM 3: TIME

Oh boy, who has time for anything these days what with Facebook, Twitter and those little people who keep nagging me about making dinner and washing their Tae Kwon Do uniforms? It seems like none of us have any time to spare.

I have this insane goal to write a novel, 50,000 words, in 30 days. (Feel free to join me in my insanity at nanowrimo.org) This goal is so important to me that I’ve figured out just exactly how I will make the time to write. Before work, after work, past midnight, forgoing real meals and hot showers, whatever it takes, I will find the time because it’s important to me. Well, that and I’m clearly insane.

Scheduling in time at work to finish project is even trickier. You already have a full schedule of things that have to be done each day, how the heck are you going to add this project to the list and meet that deadline?

My solution has been organization. I’ve organized my day into specific time slots making sure that I move things up in priority, into the morning or evening time slots, because that’s when I work the best.

A tool that helps me and my coworkers stay organized and apprised of our goals is http://www.smartsheet.com/. One of the benefits of Smartsheet is that it is viewable from anywhere you can find an internet connection, which is very helpful, especially when you take your work home.

PROBLEM 4: MOTIVATION

I was motivated to go to the gym. Once.  And that right there is the problem with motivation. Don’t wait for motivation to hit you to accomplish your goals, instead make your goal a habit! According to Dictionary.com, a habit is an acquired behavior pattern followed until it has become almost involuntary. In other words, habit requires action and action is the only way dreams and goals and projects ever get accomplished.

In the end it all comes down to the ultimate idea/dream/goal/project killer: the fear of failure. How many people do you know who don’t make any New Year’s resolutions at all? I know quite a few and when asked why it usually comes down to the very honest answer of, “I won’t keep them anyway."

If I remember to keep my goals simple, overcome my desire for perfection, make time by being more organized and make habits instead of waiting for that illusive motivation I will be successful in accomplishing my goals.

But my greatest success story has very little to do with me. I drive my kids to school every morning. In order to put all this into practice for myself I decided that we should discuss our goals on the drive and how we are going to accomplish them. I thought if I tell my kids, well then I HAVE to be accountable. We each have to share at least one small daily goal and how we think we might accomplish it. This daily goal-talk has become a habit for us and an effective one at that! My six year old has improved so much that his teacher recently sent me an email telling me about it. Now that’s success!

Do you make New Year’s resolutions or goals? How do you stay focused and accomplish your goals?

Comments

[Autumn]

Thanks for the smartsheet tip! I'm going to check it out!

[Admin]

You're welcome! It's a tool that I use daily.

[Jason]

A project is never completed at 90%; assuming that it is can be detrimental to the end product. Checks and balances, even perfectionism, is not a negative attribute to have when presenting a product to potential customers. Covering all bases and making sure the end results meets all criteria, and utilizes a team effort speaks volumes about a company's structure and its employees.

[Admin]

Jason, you are absolutely right. In hindsight I should have gone into more detail or perhaps used a better illustration to explain that sometimes projects need more defined start and end periods. Using percentages wasn't the best way to describe that. I know that for me, work projects are always evolving. If I don't say, “Okay, once A,B and C are completed, it's time to roll this out. X,Y and Z will be in version 2.0.” then I will never complete the project because I always see plenty of room for more improvement.

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