Personal and Business Goal Setting and Project Management Skills

There is only so much time in a day. Improve your daily productivity by establishing goals, prioritizing tasks and managing projects.

At least one thing the stay at home mom and business professional has in common is the ambition to more effectively use the 24 hours allocated to both of them equally in a day. There are goals and activities that both need to have completed, yesterday. Self-evaluation, goal setting, prioritizing and project management helps to convert hopes of productivity into accomplishments.

Identify your Major Life, Career and Business Goals

Can you make a list of a dozen goals you would like to achieve within the next year? Five years? Ten years? Leave off wasteful statements like "make a million dollars." These goals should be activity specific, such as "spend more quality time with my spouse," "visit Paris for two weeks," "learn to play the flute" or "start the vintage clothing boutique I have always dreamed of running." It is time to commit these dreams to paper.

Self-Evaluation and Monitoring the Neglected Areas of Your Life

Generally, we are drawn to what we enjoy or feel more comfortable tackling. Self-evaluation includes identifying those enjoyable areas of life and those neglected areas of life. Documenting your actual daily activities at certain intervals throughout the day will help you to objectively see what you are actually doing in a day. Do this for a couple weeks and you will know where actual time is being spent. Make another list that itemizes on one page (or two) those areas of your life you feel are most neglected.

Learn to Prioritize Personal and Professional Goals and Activities

Prioritization is important whether a daily to-do list or a ten year life goals list. Take out the life goals list you created. Number the most urgent as priority number one and continue on down the hierarchy of importance. Now, number the list a second time that identifies those items that you anticipate will be the most time consuming and require the most resources. Did non-priority activities and goals receive a disproportionate amount of your time today? Goals that require more resources should be broken down into project activity lists. This is project management.

Transform Business Goals into Manageable Projects

According to the book Business Essential, “[t]he primary function of project management is to manage the trade-offs between performance, timeliness, and cost.” Success in part involves controlled accomplishments or transforming goals into projects and turning projects into real-life/real-time actions that can be methodically completed.

For instance, if one of your goals is to complete a college degree, break the goal down into manageable part. This may involve project goal actions such as identifying potential schools, requesting new student catalogs through the mail, and researching available study grants and loans.

Self-evaluation, prioritization and project management are important for achieving both personal and business goals. Use some of these simple technique and find other time management resources online or at the library to help you clarify your life goals and get them back on track.

References: Business Essential, Editors of A & C Black Publishers, London (2009).