The Goal of Goal-Setting

Goal-setting chart | BCBusiness
It’s easy to lose your way on the path to achieving a goal.

It’s goal-setting time again, when we all outline our hoped-for future. Is this the year that you’re really going to stick to the path and achieve your goals?

Since the end of 2011 is nearing – can you believe it? – everybody is thinking about goals.

Personal goals, corporate goals, business goals, athletic goals, perhaps goals for the numbers of goals achieved.

It’s a frenzy of planning that overtakes most of us in – and out of – business annually. Bosses tell us to create goals (preferably stretch goals); coaches tell us to list them in pre-written paragraphs so that they’ll be in our heads all the time; the Rockefeller Habits tell us to establish big, hairy, audacious goals so we’ll have something to shoot for.

Also, to help, there are millions of websites (25,000,000 websites refer to “goal-setting” according to Google) that will not only tell you how to set goals, but often what goals you should set. And, of course, advise you on achieving those goals.

But the truth is that for most of us, goal-setting is an exercise that tends to disappear sometime around March as we lapse into old habits and patterns.

One reason is that we don’t know how to set goals. We over-commit or under-commit ourselves. We’re vague (“I’m going to be a better businessperson!”). We try to do too much (“I have 15 goals for 2012 – I win”).

Another reason is that sometimes our goals aren’t really our goals. They’re somebody else’s, or they’re the ones we think we should have.

A third problem is often in how we set these goals. We don’t write them down in detail; we don’t chunk them up, again in detail, so that they’re achievable; we don’t create realistic – and small – steps toward the larger goal so we can keep on track and not be derailed by some immediate crisis; we rarely establish timelines outside a vague “by the end of this year.”

But most of all, we aren’t able to keep track of our … um … goal goals. It’s very common to plan, write down and then file goals, then see them slowly descend to the bottom of the pile of tasks and to-dos as more immediate tasks take precedence.

However, thanks to a Langley entrepreneur, there is now a method to keep on track that doesn’t involve a superhuman effort, a regular chanted mantra or a list of your goals pasted on your briefcase, desk or the bathroom mirror.

GoalsOnTrack was founded by CEO Harry Che four years ago because, while there were plenty of programs to help people accomplish tasks and be productive, there were few to help them set and achieve goals.

The cloud-based program not only helps a user create smart goals, but also stay on the right path to achieving them through subconscious talk, better to-do listing, success visualization and daily tracking. It even has a module to help you change your habits so your old ones don’t suck you back into your old problems.

I haven’t talked to Harry, and this is no PR piece. I just happened to find his site while researching and was impressed by its thoroughness. I was even more delighted to see it was a local company that no one here appeared to know about.

Mostly, I like that it seems exactly what a too-busy, somewhat scattered and constantly veering person like myself needs to stay on the righteous path.

After all, the goal of goal-setting is to actually reach those goals, isn’t it?