Little goals keep big ones on track

Create a schedule to keep yourself honest and stay focused

During the summer of 2021, I wrote the draft of my most recent book, Tranquility by Tuesday. Book writing can sound daunting, but I decided it didn’t need to be. I created a chapter outline of nine chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. Since I’d done the research separately, I was able to assign myself one chapter per week over the summer. I made sure not to schedule chapters for any weeks when I was on vacation and didn’t have much childcare. I noted every Friday deadline in my calendar.

I’m happy to report that I stuck with the schedule and finished my draft a month before it was due. That gave me time to edit it. Having the schedule made me feel far more, well, tranquil about the process. If I’d just said “this summer I write a book!” I might have tried to cram at the beginning, and then gotten burned out. Better to march 20 miles every day than 40 miles on some and zero on others. Doable little goals keep big ones on track.

Breaking it down

Perhaps you, too, are staring down a big project. If you want to run a marathon in October, well, best to find a training program. Then, it would be a good idea to count back those 16 weeks (or whatever it is) from the race date. You can see what mileage you need to hit each week. You can plan in those runs, knowing that if you stick with these smaller, intermediate goals, you’ll be trained in the fall.

Or maybe you’re trying to save a certain amount of money by the end of the year. If you just say “Hey, by Christmas I want a $3000 emergency fund!” well, every purchase can wind up as a source of stress. Does this work? Does this not? Or you might put it out of your mind until November, and then feel the goal is impossible. But if you break this big goal down into intermediate goals, deciding to put away $100 a week for 30 weeks, well, this seems more doable. Little goals make big ones possible.

If you participate in big projects at work, hopefully people have created project timelines. I’d like to think we’ve figured that out! But often we’re less able to do this for our own professional projects that we don’t have to do but would like to do. Maybe you’d like a big raise come your annual review in December. What would you like to document by December to make that seem logical? What steps would you need to take, and when would you like to take those by? Mark down these dates. Make sure you put them somewhere you remember them, and when you plan your weeks on Fridays, you can set these intermediate goals as priorities for the upcoming week.

Staying reasonable

There many upsides to this mindset, but one particular one is that the exercise of breaking big goals into little goals helps you see what goals are reasonable and what goals are not.

If you’re trying to save $3000 over 30 weeks, this is one thing. Saying you want to save up $30,000 for a downpayment on a house over 30 weeks is something else entirely. You’d need to add a zero to your weekly target, and if you don’t see a way to put away an extra $1000 a week, then you’d need to re-evaluate. Likewise, while I know I can write a 7000 word chapter every week, if I were on the hook for, say, a 400,000 word epic over 10 weeks, that would be 40,000 words a week, which is not reasonable at all (at least for me). Intermediate goals keep us honest.

So if you’re looking at a big project you’d like to complete, take some time today to set up a schedule of intermediate goals. You’ll make the project seem far more doable…or you’ll realize that it’s not. But either way, you want to be clear so you can decide how to move forward.