Picture your goals as they stand today. Are you drawn to those quick, achievable wins you can knock out this week? Or do you naturally gravitate toward bigger visions stretching years into the future? Each of us has a comfort zone in how we set goals, and it usually lines up with one specific timeframe: short term, medium term, or long term. But what if the secret to real progress lies just outside that comfort zone? By experimenting with different strategies, tools, and techniques related to those timeframes we find less comfortable, we can open up entire new frontiers in our professional and personal lives.
We are often drawn to 1 of 3 types of goal setting: short term, medium term, or long term.
Short Term Goal Setting: Days to Weeks
Pros:
Short term goals offer a tangible sense of progress and immediate reward. The “reward center” of the brain – responsible for dopamine production and corresponding feelings of pleasure, motivation, and alertness – is highly involved in not just goal completion, but also in goal setting.
Cons:
Unfortunately, short term goals rarely offer a means to navigate our way out of the chaos that necessitated them in the first place. In highly volatile and demanding environments with shifting priorities, short term goals may be – or at least seem – the only option available; they can become a way of life where we constantly feel busy and productive yet somehow still always behind.
Tools & Techniques for Short Term Goal Setting:
Those who excel in short term goal setting typically place a high value on efficiency, and the tools and techniques of short term goal setting typically work by maximizing use of limited time and attention by controlling habits and working memory. Experiment with the following to increase your short term goal setting capacity:
- Time Management: try using time blocking, or the pomodoro method (short periods of focus followed by short breaks) in conjunction with physical or digital tools like calendars, planners, to-do lists, etc.
- Distraction Management: try limiting notifications and scheduling activities that could easily become time sinks like texting, social media, etc. for specific times in the day where they’re less likely to be a liability.
- Attention Management: try reducing decision making fatigue with attention triggers like color-coded post-its (e.g. red = must do today), alarms on your phone, habit chains such as “after I brush my teeth at night I set my gym shorts out for me to see them first thing in the morning” or, “when everyone goes to lunch, I’ll do a 5-10 minute meditation.”
Medium Term Goal Setting: Months to Quarters
Pros:
Medium term goals provide strategic clarity, bridging the big picture vision with daily and weekly tactical execution. The “executive center” or prefrontal cortex of the brain – heavily involved in logical reasoning and conscious decision making – allows us to think critically and prioritize things that are truly important to our long term success, rather than merely urgent.
Cons:
Unfortunately for us, logical reasoning and conscious decision making are highly energy-intensive processes and can be easily derailed by other brain centers. When we’re stressed under pressure (or even hungry!) our cognitive center is often the first to go offline. What’s more, strategic thinking can be felt as a time-intensive luxury, and can be habitually put off “until things calm down.”
Tools & Techniques for Medium Term Goal Setting:
Those who excel in medium term goal setting typically place a high value on results as much as or more than efficiency; the guiding questions are, “What results matter? What will actually help us get those results?”
- Milestones: If you’re new to medium term goal setting, try asking yourself, “what would be a significant milestone worth celebrating?”
- Frameworks: Efforts to ensure the long term effectiveness of strategic thinking efforts can be greatly aided by adopting a formal framework and schedule. Two popular frameworks which we’ve compared in the past are Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
- Project Management Software: Many popular software solutions such as Asana, Trello, Basecamp, Notion, etc. help individuals and teams organize and share their goals with streamlined administration.
Long Term Goal Setting: Years to Decades
Pros:
Long term goals answer big picture questions such as, “What’s worth doing?” and, “Why bother?” While sometimes these goals can be practical and concrete, such as setting an annual revenue target, they are just as often better understood by dropping the word “goals” altogether; This is the domain of vision, mission, purpose. Long term goals can unite us, inspire us to undertake great efforts, and keep the fire of motivation lit during dark and challenging times.
Cons:
Life often moves at a pace that feels divorced from long term goals. As markets change and family needs evolve, “what really matters” can easily take a back seat to the survival needs of the moment. What’s more, life’s surprises – whether business or personal – have a way of fundamentally changing our perspective on what’s worth our pursuit in the first place. On the other hand, for those that excel in long term goal setting it can be easy to get lost in distant imagined futures; the grandiosity and emotional potency of long term goals can make the challenge of navigating short term goals overwhelming and even paralyzing.
Tools & Techniques for Long Term Goal Setting:
Those who excel in long term goal setting typically place a high value on impact and experience, often over short term efficiency or medium term results; the guiding questions are, “What do I want to feel as a result of my work, and my way of being in the world? What do I want other people to feel?” The following tools & techniques can help you clarify the big picture and shape long term goals:
- The Death Test: If you’re new to long term goal setting or find it particularly unintuitive, one way to start is to adopt the most extreme long-term perspective and reflect on your own mortality. While it might sound like a morbid exercise (granted, it’s not for everyone), it can be incredibly clarifying to ask yourself, “If I were to die in [1/5/10 years] what impact would I want to leave on the world?”
- The Hero’s Journey: Imagine yourself in the future as a character in a fairy tale. Whatever your origin story, you become a hero that underwent a dangerous journey and became a champion of the people by slaying a villainous dragon. What evil, ugliness, or suffering does the dragon represent in your story? What challenges have you overcome? How are the people you love better off as a result of your hard-won victory?
- Facilitated Work on Mission, Vision, Values: Returning to a more corporate lens, great, enduring value can be gained by setting aside a couple of days during an annual retreat to evolve your company’s mission, vision, and values. Consider hiring us! 😉
Stepping Just Outside of Your Comfort Zone
Whatever your preferred timeframe or “type” of goal setting, it can be a positively life-altering decision to gain some capacity in setting goals related to those time frames that you find challenging or less intuitive. By stepping just outside (rather than way outside) of your comfort zone, you can enjoy the process of experimenting with new tools and techniques, and increase your chances and rate of adoption of these new skills.