Mastering Time Through Goals and Objectives

‘‘You too can determine what you want. You can decide on your major objectives, targets, aims, and destination.’’
—W. CLEMENT STONE

The most important word in personal effectiveness is the word clarity. The starting point of Time Power is for you
to develop absolute clarity about your goals and objectives. The most common time waster and biggest obstacle to success in life is losing sight of what you are trying to accomplish, or forgetting what you set out to do. In The Devil’s Dictionary, author Am- brose Bierce wrote, ‘‘Fanaticism is redoubling your efforts after your aim has been forgotten.’’ Many people are working hard every day, but they have no clear idea of their real goals and objectives.

Time management, more than anything else, requires you to plan and organize your time in such a way that you accomplish your most important goals as quickly as possible. Organizing 26 your goals and objectives clearly, and by priority, and then work- ing with single-minded focus on the most important things you can possibly do to achieve them, is the key to using your time effectively and well.

Join the Top 3 Percent

As it happens, fewer than 3 percent of people have clear, written goals, and they are usually the most successful in every fleld. Less than one percent of people rewrite and review their goals on a regular basis. In an article I wrote for a national publication in 1990, the publisher highlighted the words, ‘‘If you do not have goals for yourself, you are doomed forever to work for someone else.’’

That is just as true today as it was then.
In your career, you can work to achieve your own goals, or you can work to achieve the goals of another person or com- pany. The very best situation occurs when you are achieving the goals of your company or organization while you are achieving your own personal goals. But in every case, you are always work- ing to achieve goals of one kind or another.

The Master Skill of Success

Goal setting is the master skill of success. Your ability to clearly and systematically create goals, and to make plans for their ac- complishment, will help you to achieve success and happiness more than any other skill you can develop.
Goal setting is not complicated. It begins with a pad of paper, a pen, and you. Writing your goals down changes your life, some- times in dramatic and unexpected ways. As motivational speaker Zig Ziglar says, ‘‘Written goals transform you from a wandering generality into a meaningful specific.’’

The very act of committing your goals to paper programs them into your subconscious. Your subconscious mind, in combination with your superconscious mind, then goes to work on your goals twenty-four hours a day, even while you are sleeping. You begin to attract people and circumstances into your life in harmony with your goals. You get ideas and insights that can help you. You come across articles and books with solutions to your problems. You begin to experience a flow of energy and excitement that drives you forward.
Until you have practiced goal setting on a regular basis, you may be skeptical about its power to change your life. But after you have tried it, along the lines I’ll discuss here, you will be convinced. Your whole life will change.

Increase Your Achievement Rate Exponentially

In February 2003, USA Today ran an article discussing New Year’s resolutions. One year before, the newspaper had interviewed people about their resolutions for 2002. It divided the respon- dents into two categories: those who had written down their resolutions and those who had just thought about them.
One year later, only 4 percent of the people who had made resolutions, but not written them down, had made any changes. But 46 percent of those who had written down their resolutions had followed through on them. This is a difference of 1,100 per- cent in the rate of success and achievement explainable by the simple act of writing the resolution down on paper.

Essential Goal-Setting Principles

There are several essential principles of goal setting that dramatically affect the speed at which you achieve your goals. These are principles that you can return to and practice repeatedly for the rest of your career.

Principle 1: Dream Big Dreams!

Only big dreams have the power to motivate and inspire you toward the fulflllment of your full potential. Only big dreams liberate your imagination and energy, and give you the drive to overcome the obstacles and difflculties that you will experience on the path to your goal. Only big dreams can keep you excited and working enthusiastically every day toward their accomplishment.

When you set goals, practice idealization. Imagine that you have no limitations on what you can do, have, or be. Imagine your goal as if it were perfect in every respect when you set it in the flrst place. Don’t allow yourself to think of all the reasons why it may not be possible for you to achieve this goal at this time. Put those mental roadblocks and excuses aside. Set your goal as though you could achieve anything you want, as long as you are perfectly clear about what it is.
Principle 2: Write Your Goals in the Present Tense

Your goals must be in writing, in the present tense, as though they already exist. Your subconscious only accepts commands that are worded in the present tense, such as, ‘‘I weigh 150 pounds,’’ or ‘‘I earn $100,000 per year,’’ or ‘‘I live in a beautiful, 3,500-square-foot, custom-designed home.’’ Each of these goals begins with the word ‘‘I’’ and is followed by an action verb. This is the fastest and most direct way to activate your subconscious mind and harness your superconscious powers.

Positive, present-tense goals program your subconscious and build faith and conviction that your goal is realizable. The more often you read and repeat your goal, the deeper you program it into your mind, and the sooner you begin to become absolutely convinced that you will attain this goal, exactly when the timing is right for you.

Rewrite Your Goals Daily

My favorite technique for programming my goals deep into my subconscious mind is to rewrite my goals in the present tense each day in a spiral notebook. I learned this technique many years ago. I was absolutely astonished at the speed at which my life began to improve when I began to rewrite my goals each day. The best time to rewrite your goals is flrst thing in the morn- ing, before you start your day. This exercise only takes about flve minutes, but writing out your goals activates all your mental powers so that throughout the day, you will be more sensitive and aware to possibilities and opportunities to achieve those
goals.

Affirm Your Goals Regularly

There is a wonderful technique for goal attainment called the Standard Afflrmation Technique. To use this method, you get a stack of three- by flve-inch index cards and write out your goals in the present tense, one per card, in large letters.

Each day, and throughout the day, take out your stack of goal cards and review them, one at a time. As you read each goal, concentrate on the words on the card as though you were trying to photograph them with the lenses of your eyes. Think about one or more things you could do to achieve that goal. Then go on to the next card.

When you combine the two methods, writing and rewriting your goals daily in a notebook, and regularly reviewing them on index cards, you begin to believe that these goals are achievable. You eventually convince yourself at a deep subconscious level that the attainment of these goals is inevitable. As you become more and more confldent that your goals will soon become reali- ties, you begin to move faster toward them, and they start to move faster toward you. You activate more of your mental pow- ers. When you practice either one or both of these methods for thirty days, you will be astonished at the changes that will take place in your life.

Principle 3: Keep Your Goals in Balance
Your goals must be in balance and cover the three most impor- tant areas of your life. They must be in harmony with each other, not contradictory. Just as a wheel must be perfectly balanced to rotate smoothly, your life must be in balance as well for you to feel happy and effective.

What Do You Really Want?

The flrst types of goals you need are business, career, and flnan- cial goals. These are the tangible, measurable things that you want to achieve as the result of your efforts at work. These are the ‘‘what’’ that you want to accomplish in life. With these tangi- ble goals, you must be absolutely clear about how much you want to earn, and in what time period you want to earn it. You must be clear about how much you want to save, invest, and accumulate, and when you want to acquire these amounts. Re- member, you can’t hit a target that you can’t see.

Why Do You Want to Achieve Your Goals?

The second types of goals you need are your personal, family, and health goals. In reality, these are the most important goals of all in determining your happiness and well-being. These are called the ‘‘why’’ goals because they are the reasons you want to achieve your business, career, and flnancial goals. They are your true aim and purpose in life.

Many people become so involved with their work and ca- reers, and their flnancial goals, that they lose sight of the reasons why they wanted flnancial success in the flrst place. They get their priorities mixed up. As a result, their lives get out of bal- ance. They start to feel stressed and driven. Sometimes they be- come angry and frustrated. No matter how hard they work to achieve business and flnancial goals, they don’t seem to enjoy any more peace, happiness, and satisfaction in life. They need to get their goals back in the right order of priority and realize that achieving work and flnancial goals are the means to the end of enjoying family and relationship goals. They are not the ends in themselves.

How Do You Achieve Your Goals?

The third types of goals you require are your personal and pro- fessional growth and development goals. These are the ‘‘how’’ goals. Learning and practicing new skills and behaviors are how you achieve the ‘‘what’’ in order to enjoy the ‘‘why.’’ By working on yourself, you become the kind of person who is capable of achieving your business, career, and flnancial goals. As a result, you can achieve and enjoy your personal, family, and health goals faster and easier. By working on all three types of goals simultaneously, you keep your life in balance and continue mov- ing onward and upward.

Principle 4: Know Your Major Definite Purpose

You must decide what your ‘‘major deflnite purpose’’ is. This is the one goal in your life that is more important than any other. This is the one goal that, if accomplished, will allow you to attain more of your other goals.
The selection of a major deflnite purpose for your life is the starting point of great success. This decision enables you to focus and concentrate your mental and physical energies on a single point, the one that can have the greatest positive impact on your life at this time. Deciding upon your major deflnite purpose, at each stage of your life, is one of the major responsibilities of adulthood.

How to Decide What You Really Want

There are several questions that you can ask yourself to help you determine your major deflnite purpose. These questions force you to think through who you are and what you really want to do with your life.

• What would you do differently,or how would you change your life, if you won a million dollars in the lottery tomorrow? If you became an instant millionaire, tax free, what would you do differently in your life from what you are doing today? What would you start doing that you are not doing right now? What would you stop doing? What would you do more or less of? Where would you go? Who would you see? What is the flrst change that you would make if you had a million dollars in cash in your hands right now?

Asking this question of yourself helps you to clarify what you really want in life. Most people hold themselves back and sell themselves short because they feel that they are limited or trapped flnancially. Because of this feeling of limitation, they never sit down and think through what it is they really want. They develop self-limiting beliefs. They begin to see themselves as victims. According to Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, they develop ‘‘learned helplessness.’’ They feel that they are helpless and unable to change their situations be- cause of their lack of money.

But when you ask yourself what you would do if you had a million dollars, you are really asking what you would do if you had no fears of failure. You are forcing yourself to decide how you would live your life if you had all the money that you really wanted. By imagining yourself free of flnancial worries, your mind clears and you see what you really want to be, have, and do in the months and years ahead.

• If you could write your own biography, what would it say? Project yourself forward to the end of your life, and imagine writ- ing your own biography. If you could design your life in advance, and write your own story, what would you want to happen in your life? What kind of a person do you want to become? What sort of things do you want to achieve? Imagine that you could write the script of your own life, and if you were not happy with the script, you could tear it up and write a new one.

Imagine that you could write your own eulogy, to be read to your friends and relatives at your funeral. What would you want it to say? What would you want people to think about you after you pass away? How do you want to be remembered by the most important people in your life?
When you ask these questions, and imagine writing your own life story, or your own obituary, you free up your mind to see what is really important to you. You develop a ‘‘long-term per- spective’’ and begin to become clear about what you really want to accomplish with your life.

• What one great goal would you dare to set for yourself if you knew you could not fail? If you were absolutely guaranteed of success in any goal, short-term or long-term, big or small, what one goal would you commit yourself to accomplishing?

Your mind is remarkable. Something amazing happens be- tween your head and your hand. The very fact that you can write out a goal clearly on paper means that you have the ability to achieve it somehow. Your desire is the only real limit on your potential. The only question is, ‘‘How badly do you want it?’’
Your ability to identify the one great goal that you would dare to commit yourself to if you were guaranteed of success is very often the best single indicator of your major deflnite purpose. This is the one goal you are meant to accomplish and that can have the most positive impact on your life.

• What do you really love to do, at home or at work? What gives you your greatest feeling of importance? What accomplish- ments give you your greatest sense of achievement and satisfac- tion? If you could only do one thing all day long, what one task or activity would it be?

Psychologists have discovered that the activities that give you your greatest feelings of self-esteem are usually the tasks or activ- ities that you are ideally suited to do as a life’s work. You will always love to do the things that you are most likely to have the natural talents and abilities to do extremely well. Organizing your life and activities around your special talents and abilities is the key to peak performance and high achievement. When you flnd the job or position where your special skills meet the needs of the situation, you will make more progress in the next two years than you may have made in ten years working at something else.

• What are your three most important goals in life right now? Use the Quick List method. Take a pen in hand and give yourself thirty seconds to quickly write down your response to this question. When you write down your three most important goals in this fashion, your answer will be as accurate as if you had thirty minutes or three hours. Your subconscious discards all secondary goals. Your important aims or purposes will pop to the surface of your mind and appear on the paper in front of you.
You can then ask, ‘‘What are my three most pressing worries or concerns in life right now?’’ Give yourself thirty seconds to write down your answer.

Once you have answers to both questions, you will have a snapshot of your current life. These responses will tell you a lot about yourself. First, your three goals will almost always be a flnancial goal, a health goal, and a relationship goal. Second, your three goals will almost always be the solutions to your three main worries and concerns. In most cases, your three goals are the flip side of the coin of your three worries. You can resolve your problems by achieving your goals.

Analyze Your Life

Try this Quick List exercise in each key area of your life. Quickly write down your three most important business, family, health, and flnancial goals. You can give this exercise to members of your family or your coworkers as well. Give them thirty seconds to write down the three most important goals in their life.
Your three problems or worries represent your past, or where you are coming from or what you are moving away from. Your three goals represent your future, and what you are moving toward, both consciously and unconsciously. When you ask yourself these questions regularly, you will enjoy ever-greater clarity about who you are and what you really want. You will get more and more ideas to achieve your goals and solve your problems.

• What specific steps will you have to take to achieve your most important goals? A goal that is not accompanied by a detailed, organized list of actions that must be taken to accomplish it is like trying to build a house without a blueprint. The more detailed your plans of action, the more likely you are to achieve your goals, and in a shorter period of time.

Imagine No Limitations

Here is a simple but powerful exercise to identify your goals and organize your life. Take out a sheet of paper. Write down every- thing you would like to accomplish in your business and per- sonal life over the next flve years. Imagine that you have no limitations of time, money, talent, people, resources, or abilities. When you write out your goals, imagine that whatever you write down is possible for you, as long as the goal is clear.

You can conduct this exercise as a brainstorming session with the members of your staff or with other key people. In your business, you can write down everything you would like to ac- complish over the next flve years regarding sales, growth, proflt- ability, people, products, services, processes, and market share.
You can conduct this exercise with your spouse at home. Sit down together and write out everything that you would like to be, have, or do in your lives together over the next flve years, or even longer.
In the Bible it says, ‘‘Let there be light.’’ The more time you take to write out every possible goal that you would like to achieve sometime in the future, the greater light you will have in your life. You will be far more knowledgeable and aware of what it is you really want to accomplish in the months and years ahead.

As you write down your goals, think about the things you have always wanted to do in the past but may have given up on because of constraints of time, money, marriage, or other factors. When you write, let your imagination run freely. Concentrate on writing out as many goals as possible, without worrying about whether they are achievable, logical, or reasonable. Just get them down on paper.

Organize Your Goals by Priority

Once you have written out your list of goals for the foreseeable future, go back over the list and organize it by priority. Put an A, B, or C in front of each of the goals. An ‘‘A’’ goal is something that is especially important to you. It is a goal that you would really like to achieve and would make you tremendously happy if you were to attain it.
A ‘‘B’’ goal is something that you would like to achieve and would enjoy acquiring if you were successful. It is important to you, but it is not quite as important as an ‘‘A’’ goal.
A ‘‘C’’ goal is something that would be nice to accomplish, or nice to have or do, but it is not as important as an ‘‘A’’ or ‘‘B’’ goal. It is only when you write your goals down and compare them against each other that you develop absolute clarity about their relative importance to you.

Select Your Most Important Goals

Transfer all of your ‘‘A’’ goals onto a separate sheet of paper. Review these goals and organize them by writing ‘‘A-1,’’ ‘‘A-2,’’ ‘‘A-3,’’ and so on next to them.

Select from your ‘‘A’’ list the most important of all goals, the one goal that could have the greatest positive impact on your life if you were to achieve it. Ask yourself, ‘‘If I could achieve any goal on this list, which one goal would give me more happiness, satisfaction, and rewards than any other?’’ This becomes your A-1 goal.

Work through the ‘‘A’’ list by asking yourself this question: ‘‘If I could only accomplish one more goal on this list, which one goal would it be?’’ This becomes your A-2 goal. Then ask this question again and again, until you have organized all of your ‘‘A’’ goals by priority.

Finally, take your A-1 goal, the most important goal of all, and write it down at the top of a new page. This goal becomes your major deflnite purpose for the foreseeable future.

Make Detailed Plans of Action

The next step is to make a list of every single action that you can think of that you can take to achieve your most important goal. You should come up with at least ten or twenty different things you could do to accomplish this goal. When you have written down everything that you can think of, you then organize this list of activities by writing an ‘‘A,’’ ‘‘B,’’ or ‘‘C’’ in front of each of the items. Ask yourself: ‘‘If I could only do one thing on this list, which one action would help me to achieve this goal more than any other?’’ Finally, go back and you write A-1, A-2, A-3, until your list of activities is organized into a plan of action, from be- ginning to end.

You can repeat this exercise with each of your ‘‘A’’ goals. Write the goal in the present tense at the top of a sheet of paper and then discipline yourself to generate ten to twenty speciflc, concrete actions that you can take to achieve that goal. Organize each of these lists by priority, using the A-B-C method. This entire exercise will only take you between one and two hours, perhaps on a Sunday afternoon. But once you have accomplished it, you will have a list of clear goals, organized in order of priority, com- bined with a series of action steps also organized by priority.
With this set of goals and plans, you will have moved yourself into the top 3 percent of people in our society. You will have taken control of your future. You will have grasped the steering wheel of your own life and turned it in a different direction.

What will happen to you as the result of this exercise will absolutely amaze you. Try it and see.

Turbocharging Your Goal-Achieving Ability

There are flve techniques that you can practice to accelerate the speed at which you achieve your goals. These methods will ‘‘tur- bocharge’’ your energies and abilities and allow you to accomplish more in a shorter period of time than you ever thought possible. These techniques are to:

1. Visualize your goal as a reality
2. Positively afflrm your goal as accomplished
3. Accept complete responsibility for results
4. Step out in faith
5. Do something daily

Visualize Your Goal as a Reality

Create a clear mental picture of your goal as if it has already been realized. Imagine your goal as though you were already enjoying the flnished result. Close your eyes and think of what your goal would look like. Think about the kind of person you would be if you had achieved the goal. Think about how much you would enjoy the achievement of that goal or objective. This ability to visualize is one of the great powers of the human mind. Your subconscious makes your outer world consistent with your inner world. To activate this power, you only need to create a ‘‘mental equivalent’’ of what you want to see in your outer life. Your sub- conscious will do the rest.

Activate the Law of Attraction

As if you were running a movie projector, you should play and replay this picture continuously on the screen of your mind. This picture will then activate your subconscious and trigger the Law of Attraction. This law says that you are a ‘‘living magnet’’ and that you inevitably attract into your life the ideas, people, and resources that you need to achieve your most intensely desired goals.

Change Your Beliefs

The Law of Belief says: Whatever you believe, with conviction, becomes your reality. You do not believe what you see, but you see what you already believe. There is a one-to-one relationship between how intensely you believe that your goals are achievable and how rapidly they appear in your life. As William James, the renowned Harvard professor and philosopher, said, ‘‘Belief cre- ates the actual fact.’’

The Law of Mind says: Thoughts objectify themselves. When you replay the picture of your goal repeatedly in your conscious mind, you begin to believe with ever-increasing intensity that the goal is achievable for you. As your belief grows, your goal begins to take physical form in your external world sometimes far faster than you can imagine.

Positively Affirm Your Goal as Accomplished

Create a clear statement or afflrmation of your goal as already achieved. Enthusiastically repeat this statement to yourself. Imbue your statement with emotion, conviction, and emphasis. As you repeat this positive afflrmation, you imprint this com- mand to achieve the goal deeper and deeper into your subcon- scious mind. Use personal language, such as ‘‘I earn $75,000 per year!’’ Or, ‘‘I weigh 175 pounds,’’ or ‘‘I am an outstanding salesperson.’’ By using afflrmations, you can totally reprogram your thinking about yourself and your goals. With afflrmations, your potential becomes unlimited.

Accept Complete Responsibility for Results

Accept 100 percent responsibility for doing everything that is necessary to achieve your goal. Repeat to yourself, ‘‘If it’s to be, it’s up to me.’’ Refuse to make excuses for not making progress. Refuse to rationalize or explain away your lack of success. Refuse to justify the reasons for your problems and obstacles. Instead, accept total responsibility for achieving your goal. Become to- tally self-reliant.

Here is an interesting discovery. When you accept complete responsibility for achieving your goal, people will emerge to help you and guide you along the path to your success. But when you make excuses, blame others, and expect them to help you, they will ignore you and avoid you. When you look to yourself first, you are far more likely not only to be more successful, but to attract into your life the support of the people you need. If you look to other people to help you achieve your goals, you will almost always be disappointed.

Step Out in Faith

Once you are clear about what you want, the next step is to act as if it were impossible to fail.

As Thoreau said, ‘‘Go confldently in the direction of your dreams.’’ Act as though achievement of the goal was absolutely inevitable. Carry yourself in your daily activities with others, in everything you do and say, exactly as if the achievement of your goal was guaranteed by some great power.

Do Something Daily

Do something every day that moves you toward your major goal or goals. By the yard it’s hard, but inch by inch, anything is a cinch. When you do something every single day that moves you closer to your goal, you eventually develop an unshakable faith and belief that your goal will ultimately be achieved.

In the flnal analysis, every goal-setting exercise must be re- duced to speciflc, concrete action steps that you can take to achieve the goal. If you do just one thing each day, no matter how big the goal or how far away it may be, this single action will keep you motivated and focused. It will keep your subconscious mind stimulated and active. Daily movement toward your goal will energize you and increase your confldence.

Achieving Income and Career Goals

Here are flve key ideas for setting goals for your income and your career:

1. Focus on customer satisfaction. Everybody makes a living by serving someone else. Whatever you do for a living, you are always in the business of customer satisfaction. Your job is to determine your most important customers, inside and outside your company, and then dedicate yourself to serving them better and faster.
Who is your customer? Your customer is the person whose satisfaction determines your success in your career. It is the per- son who depends on you for something that you do for them. Your customer is the person you have to please in order to be paid more and promoted faster.

In business, your boss is your primary customer. If you please your boss by doing the things that this person wants or needs, you will be successful. If you please everyone else in your company but you don’t please your boss, your job will be in jeopardy. What does your boss need to be happy with your per- formance?
If you are a manager, your staff members are also your cus- tomers. Your staff has been entrusted to you to help you achieve your goals of satisfying your customers. In order for you to do your job satisfactorily, your staff must be happy with you and with the way you treat them. The very best bosses have the happi- est and most productive staff members. Who are your most im- portant staff members?

Your coworkers and colleagues, over whom you have no di- rect control or influence, are also your customers. Their help, or lack of help, can have a major impact on your ability to do your job well. Who are the people around you whose support and cooperation you require to get your job done well?
The primary customer for your business is the person who purchases and uses your product or service. Your ability to satisfy this customer’s wants and needs in a timely fashion, at a reason- able price, and at an appropriate level of quality, is the key not only to your success, but also to the survival of your entire enter- prise.

2. Find out what your customers want. Keep asking your- self, Who is my customer? How does my customer deflne satisfac- tion? What value does my customer expect from me? How do I best please my customer?
Every company that is successful is continually asking its cus- tomers, ‘‘What can we do to please you better? What can we do to satisfy you even more next time?’’ Every individual should be asking these questions as well.
One of the biggest problems in the world of work is that people are not clear about exactly what they need to do to satisfy their bosses. One of the best things you can do on a regular basis is to go to your boss and ask, ‘‘Why am I on the payroll? What is the most important thing that I do around here, from your point of view?’’

You can be doing your job extraordinarily well, but if what you are working on is not important to your boss, you will actu- ally be sabotaging your career. However, if you do the one or two things that are most important to your boss, those actions that generate the highest levels of ‘‘customer satisfaction’’ in his eyes, this alone can advance your career faster than anything else you could do.
To succeed at work, you must ask yourself repeatedly, ‘‘Why am I on the payroll? What results have I been hired to achieve?’’

3. Determine your primary output responsibilities. Contin- ually ask yourself, your boss, and the people around you, ‘‘What are my primary output responsibilities?’’ In other words, what are you expected to produce as the result of your work?
There are three ways of deflning an output responsibility.

First, an output responsibility is measurable, concrete, speciflc, and it can be deflned clearly on paper. You can attach a number and a standard of performance to it. An output responsibility is a certain quality and quantity of work that can be deflned and measured by an objective third party, including your boss.
For example, ‘‘getting along well with others’’ is not an out- put responsibility. It may be a necessary activity for you to per- form your job, but because it is neither measurable nor concrete, it is not a key determinant of your success or failure.

Second, an output responsibility is something that is under your control. It is something that you can do from beginning to end. It does not depend on someone else.
Third, an output responsibility is a task or result that serves as an input for someone else. In other words, every output that you produce serves as an input to someone else. It becomes a part of someone else’s job. For example, if you make a sale, that output becomes an input to your organization, which must now produce, deliver, and service the product.

Consequently, each product or service that your company produces becomes an input to the life or work of someone else. If your company manufacturers computers or photocopiers, those machines become the outputs of your organization and inputs to other organizations, which then use them to produce outputs of their own.
The questions for you to ask are: ‘‘Who must use what I pro- duce? What does it take to please the people or organizations that have to use what I produce? How can I best satisfy my most important customers?’’ The most successful people and organi- zations are those who please the greatest number of their cus- tomers by giving them what they want, in the way they want it, at prices they are willing to pay.

4. Determine your key result areas. In setting business and career goals, you must be continually asking, ‘‘What are my key result areas?’’ This is an essential question for business and ca- reer success. What is it that you and only you can do that, if done well, will make a real difference to your organization or will yield extraordinary results? Think of a task that only you can do. If you do not do it, it will not be done by anyone else. But if you do it, and do it well, it can make a real contribution to yourself and your organization. There are seldom more than flve to seven key result areas in any job. Your ability to perform well in each of the key result areas of your particular position is the key to your overall suc- cess. You could do many of your tasks in an excellent fashion, but if they are not among your key result areas, they could actu- ally be harmful to your career. The time you spend on them will take you away from doing the vital few things that your success
depends on.

Apply the 80/20 rule to everything you do. Just 20 percent of the things you do will account for 80 percent of the value of your work. It is essential that you work on the top 20 percent of activities that account for most of your results.

5. Practice management by objectives. One of the most ef- fective forms of corporate goal setting is ‘‘management by objec- tives.’’ This technique should only be used with competent people—that is, with people who have mastered the job and know what needs to be done. This method requires that you entrust an entire task to an individual.
There are four steps to management by objectives.

First, de- flne the desired goal or result clearly, in discussion with the per- son who will have the responsibility of achieving it. Take the time to agree exactly on what is to be accomplished.

Second, discuss and agree on the plan of implementation. What steps will be taken to accomplish the goal? How is it to be done? How will you measure success? What standards of performance will you use? How will you know that the job has been done well? And especially, what will be the consequences for doing or not doing the job in an effective and timely way?

Third, agree on a time of completion, and set a schedule to review progress and problems. When is the job expected to be flnished? The setting of clear deadlines and schedules is a vital part of management by objectives.
Fourth, leave the person alone to do the job. Once you have assigned a clearly deflned job with output responsibilities and standards of performance to a competent person, leave the per- son alone to do the job in his own way.

The key to delegation is to delegate the task completely and refuse to take it back. Do not interfere. Give whatever advice, guidance, and support is necessary for the person to do the job, but make it clear that the job is the responsibility of that person. One of the most powerful ways to build competence, confl- dence, and ability in other people is to assign complete responsi- bility to them for the achievement of an important task. When people know that they are completely responsible, it gives them a greater sense of personal power and control. It builds initiative and resolve. It develops persistence and determination. It is one of the most powerful of all people-building tools available to parents or managers. And, it is a great time saver.

Achieving Your Goals Faster

There are four important thinking tools that you can apply to the achievement of any goal. The application and use of these tools greatly improves your competence and ability to accomplish the goals that you have set for yourself, and for your business.

1. Remove the obstacles. Identify the obstacles that stand between you and your goal. What is holding you back from achieving your goal? Why haven’t you achieved it already? Write down every single obstacle or difflculty that you think is limiting your ability to achieve the goal that you have deflned.
These may include internal obstacles, or obstacles within yourself. They may be external obstacles, or obstacles that are created by circumstances or the situation in the world around you.

Once you have determined the obstacles that are holding you back, identify and determine your single largest obstacle. What is the major obstacle that is standing in the way of your complet- ing this task? Resolve to go to work on this one obstacle and concentrate single-mindedly on it until it is removed.

Peter Drucker said, ‘‘In every complex problem, there is usu- ally a single large problem that must be solved before any other problems can be solved.’’ Your job is to identify the biggest sin- gle problem or difflculty that is holding you back and then focus on solving that before you get sidetracked by smaller problems and difflculties.

2. Identify your limiting step. In the accomplishment of al- most any goal (whether it’s increasing your income, doubling your sales, or losing weight) or the completion of any job, there is usually one step that determines how fast you can get from where you are to where you want to go. This is the bottleneck or choke point in the process. Your ability to identify and remove this bottleneck is one of the most important techniques for effl- ciency and effectiveness that can move you toward the achieve- ment of your goal faster than any other action.

The 80/20 rule applies to this principle of constraints, or lim- iting factors, in a special way. In this case, the 80/20 rule says that ‘‘Eighty percent of the reasons that you are not achieving your goal are contained within yourself, or your company.’’ Only 20 percent of the constraints on your ability to accomplish what you want are contained in external circumstances or the environ- ment around you.

The starting point of personal effectiveness is for you to, flrst of all, deflne your goal and, second, to ask yourself, ‘‘What is it in me that is holding me back?’’ When you look into yourself, you will almost always flnd that it is the lack of a particular skill, quality, or behavior that is your main constraint on achieving a particular goal or result. This is the ‘‘what’’ that you need to work on before you do anything else.

3. Determine the knowledge and skills you will require. Identify the additional knowledge or skills that you require to achieve your goal. What else do you need to learn? What else do you need to know? What is the most important additional knowledge, skill, or experience that you require in order to achieve the goal that you have set for yourself?
As professional speaker Les Brown has said, ‘‘In order to achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must become someone that you have never been before.’’ To accomplish bigger and better goals, you will have to develop new skills and acquire new knowledge. You cannot achieve more than you are achieving today without developing yourself to a higher level.

Remember, knowledge is power. But only practical knowl- edge that can be applied toward getting desired results is true power. Ask yourself, ‘‘What practical knowledge do I need to acquire in order to move more rapidly toward the achievement of my goals and the accomplishment of my tasks?’’

Sometimes the practical knowledge you need is in marketing and sales. Sometimes it is the skill of managing people. Some- times it is the knowledge of strategic planning or organizational development. Often it is knowledge that is hard to identify, but discovering the critical knowledge you need and then going to work to acquire it can have an inordinate impact on your results.

4. Determine the people whose help you will need. Identify the people whose help, support, and cooperation will be neces- sary for you to achieve your goals, both personal and business- related. Whose help do you need? Who can help you to get to the goal? Who can block you from achieving your goal? Who do you need to work in cooperation with to achieve your goal in a timely fashion?

Often when you set a goal that is going to take a lot of your time, you will need the cooperation and understanding of your family. If you want to rise to a position of prominence in your company or industry, you will need the cooperation of your boss, your coworkers, and your subordinates.

Think about the people whose cooperation you will require. What can you do to get them to want to cooperate with you? What is in it for them? How will they beneflt from helping you to achieve your goals? Always start with what others need and re- quire, then work backward to identify what it is that you need and require.

Asking Yourself the Right Questions

Here are some flnal questions that you can ask to keep yourself clear, focused, and on track in the achievement of your goals and objectives.

First, you should ask regularly, ‘‘What am I trying to do?’’ Exactly what is it that you are attempting to achieve as the result of your work and your efforts? Vagueness and fuzziness in your answer to this question makes it almost impossible for you to achieve your goals on schedule.

Second, you should ask, ‘‘How am I trying to do it?’’ Is your current method working? What are your assumptions? Are you assuming something that might not be true? Could there be a better way to achieve your goal than the method that you are currently using?

Third, you can ask, ‘‘What are my real goals?’’ How do these goals affect my personal life? Why am I doing what I am doing? It is absolutely essential that you be clear about the real purpose behind your goals if you want to remain motivated and energized in your pursuit of them.

Fourth, and perhaps the most important question to ask is, ‘‘What is my aim in life?’’ What is my aim in my work? What is my aim with my family? What do I want to accomplish as the result of being alive? What do I really want to do with my life?
These are questions that you should ask yourself over and over again to keep yourself on track.

Developing Absolute Clarity

The starting point of time management is for you to achieve ab- solute clarity with regard to your goals, in every area of your life and at every level of your business. Like a photographer, you must continually focus the lens of your time and activities on exactly the most important things that you are trying to accom- plish and the reasons that you want to accomplish them.
All time management skills require a clear, unambiguous agreement about goals and objectives. Decide exactly what it is that you are trying to achieve and focus single-mindedly on your most important goals and activities. This is the flrst step toward excellent time management.

‘‘There is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to achieve it.’’
—NAPOLEON HILL

Action Exercises

1. Clarity is essential! Make a list of ten goals for the coming year in every area of your business and personal life. Write in the present tense, as if you have already achieved the goal.

2. Review your list and ask, ‘‘What one goal, if I achieved it, would have the most positive impact on my life, right now?’’ Write this goal at the top of a new page.

3. Set a speciflc deadline for the achievement of this goal. Set sub-deadlines, if necessary.

4. Make a list of everything you can think of to do to achieve this goal. As you think of new activities, add them to the list. Keep updating your list until it is complete.

5. Organize your list into a plan. Decide what is most impor- tant. Decide what must be done flrst, before something else can be done.

6. Determine the obstacles you will have to overcome, the additional knowledge and skills you will require, and the people whose help you will need. Be speciflc.

7. Take action on your most important goal, and resolve to do something every day that moves you one step closer to achieving it. Never give up!