How to Make 2022 a Success by Sticking to Your Goals

The start of a new year means hope, growth, and new beginnings for many people. It’s psychological—transition periods like the start of a new year motivate people to create personal or professional goals. 

Naturally, we get excited for New Year’s resolutions. We even create plans to stick to them and follow them to a T for a couple of weeks. Yet, how many times have we lost our initial drive and let go? If you’re like most people, probably more often than you’d like to admit. As a startup founder, I have fallen into this trap myself. I’ve wasted time on projects that didn’t pan out, such as launching shiny new marketing channels or changing the company branding.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, we all have goals that stem from our desires—sometimes as simple as “having a toasted slice of bread right now”. However, some goals affect our lives more than others. These are the kind we tend to reflect on during transition periods, like the start of a new year.

It’s crucial to have higher-level goals because they give us purpose and make our lives meaningful. Research shows that people need to do more than just satisfy their immediate wants and needs. Pursuing meaningfulness results in more life satisfaction than just going after the nebulous concept of 'happiness'. Startup founders and entrepreneurs know this more than most people—it’s difficult but rewarding to build a business.

For entrepreneurs, goals can encompass everything from developing a new app to gaining new customers. Creating goals feels like a big deal, and it is—if we don’t sit down and figure out what we want, we won’t get anywhere. The problem with goal-setting is that we often lose drive to pursue our goals. We might still want the outcome, but are unwilling or unable to work for it. Hence, goal-setting alone is not enough. To accomplish anything concrete, we need to think more about how to achieve our goals.

Execution is Just as Important as Setting Goals

Setting goals is one thing, but achieving results is another. Goals are more likely to come to fruition if they are SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Executives should use SMART goals to simplify organizing and handling tasks:

1. Specific: The stated goal should provide exact information about the desired outcome, the person responsible for moving towards this result, and what resources are needed to achieve the goal: Who does what, how, and where.
2. Measurable: A goal should contain quantifiable information. How much should be produced? What are the milestones? Which Key Performance Indicators need to be met? Metrics make it easy to determine if we’ve achieved our goal.
3. Attainable: Goals must remain within the realm of possibility. We must have the skills and resources that enable us to achieve the given goal. A goal can stretch one’s abilities but not to the point of failure.
4. Relevant: A goal should matter—the “why” should be clear. Otherwise, completing it will be pointless. Meanwhile, work-related goals should fit within the department or company’s overarching aims.
5. Time-bound: All goals need to have deadlines. Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” If we don’t set a deadline for tasks, we won’t feel any urgency to complete the work. Stay on track by setting a deadline or asking another person to set one.

Setting a SMART goal is only the first step of execution. Seeing goals through to the end involves breaking them down into sub-goals, e.g., outlining the steps needed to reach the objective. For more complex goals, it is often helpful to work within frameworks such as Kanban or SCRUM; however, for this article, we’ll keep it simple and refer to these steps as our plan.

For example, if the main goal is to renovate a garage, it’ll be more helpful to make a plan in the form of a series of smaller goals. These goals could be “dispose of the trash by the end of the day,” “sort all tools by next week,” or “hold a garage sale next Saturday.” By planning a sequence of steps, we’ll be on top of our tasks and easily see who does what, when, where, how, and why. 

Most goals aren’t one-offs, so it may be necessary to implement a recurring set of actions for meeting milestones. For example, “Produce 16 search-optimized and insightful blog posts per quarter” involves several smaller goals covering keyword research, composition, and editing, among other things. In this case, we would want to set up a process—a recurring plan—to achieve our results.

For Team Leaders, Delegation is Crucial

Even if we craft the finest SMART goal, create the perfect plan, and set up an ideal process—if we overload ourselves, we still won’t succeed. As executives, we need to regularly delegate certain tasks. 

Doing so enables us to set up organizations that deliver high-quality work. We should start delegating by taking stock of all current tasks and measuring the impact and effort needed for accomplishing them. To evaluate our activities, we can utilize the following matrix:

The above figure is based on the Impact-Effort Matrix for root cause analysis. It shows four types of tasks—Quick Wins (high impact, low effort), Major Projects (high impact, high effort), Fill-Ins (low impact, low effort), and Thankless Tasks (low impact, high effort). As executives, we should be doing high-impact tasks and handing off the rest to assistants or junior teammates.

You’ll know if a task is high-impact if completing it means taking a significant step forward in your department’s goals for the month or quarter. Investor dinners and developing an app are both good examples of high-impact tasks. On the other hand, filing business taxes, filling out forms, or scheduling social media posts are things that should be offloaded to someone else whenever possible.

I’m an advocate for empowering people at all levels through task delegation. My industry is all about matching executives with professionals who can take on tedious work, so I know The Art of Delegation . To achieve the best possible outcomes, we must match tasks with the right team members. People have different strengths, so we should learn about them and leverage them when we can. 

Take, for instance, how my marketing team is completing a time-consuming task: One of our current projects is to produce a series of brochures highlighting industry-specific use cases of our services. Instead of painstakingly researching the use cases one at a time by ourselves, we ventured out to other departments and delegated this part of the process. Since the team members in those departments interact more closely with our clients, they can easily and quickly get us that information. Clearly defining the other steps of the process for my team members rounds up the process and ensures we are consistently achieving our goals.

Discipline: The Backbone of a Well-Oiled Process

Discipline is something nearly everyone claims to either have or want. However, people who don’t know how to be disciplined won’t consistently meet their goals. So, what does it mean to be disciplined?

In my experience, discipline essentially involves self-reflection; to regularly check how actions sync up with intentions. In addition, it is important to carefully prioritize our goals based on their purpose. The relative importance informs our decision which goals to pursue.

For example, if we find ourselves in a situation where we have conflicting goals such as finishing a Netflix show or living a healthier lifestyle by working out daily, all we have to do is ask ourselves which one is more important to us. If finishing the Netflix show is more important to us than a healthy lifestyle, then we can drop the workout in favor of the couch with a clean conscience. Our actions will be in sync with our intentions.

Once we have ranked and prioritized our goals, we should find a routine that incorporates the plans to execute our most important goals on a regular schedule. Such a routine will save time and energy, since we won't have to constantly analyze our goals. 

Some people find routines unsettling. For me personally, deviating from my plans and breaking the routine would be an unsettling thing. It would mean that I am going against a carefully derived analysis of what I want to achieve. If I broke the process once, I would be likely to do it again, thus not going to get what I want.

We should be mindful about the goals we set in the first place—getting rallied up on a healthy lifestyle would be a waste of time if we know that watching Netflix is ultimately more important to us. 

Establishing priorities helps us align activities meaningfully so that we know which action items we should pursue consistently and where we can compromise. Therefore, well-thought-out prioritization and corresponding routines are what will get us the results we want.

Conclusion: Success is Not a Coincidence but Can be Planned

I have seen many people putting stock in instant gains and neglecting the value of long-term plans and strategies, foregoing the opportunity to pursue real purpose. I would characterize many of those people as enviers who believe success stems from luck. However, luck has little to do with achieving goals. 

Everything we want to achieve in life starts with a desire. It’s on us to shape our wants into goals and to direct our time and energy towards achieving them. Goals hold purpose, which can help us achieve a higher quality of life and overall satisfaction. 

To set goals and achieve the desired results, we must ensure that they’re specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Since the building blocks for a plan are embedded in SMART goals, we can align the respective actions on a timeline and set up processes to consistently achieve results. This structure is the foundation of success.

If we’re creating goals within an organization and find that we have a lot on our plate, making our goals SMART helps us delegate tasks, freeing us up for more high-impact activities. With delegation and the right processes in place, teams can develop a routine to efficiently and reliably deliver results. 

Finally, we have to be honest with ourselves and outline what’s important for us—and what’s not. We will make 2022 a success if we carefully ask ourselves what we want and how much we want it. In the end, it’s as simple as organizing our top priorities and following the respective action plan as a routine. It’s not magic, but it requires impetus.

I'll go do my core strength workout now before I continue watching Narcos on Netflix. This is my Wednesday routine reflecting some of my priorities. Writing another article got deprioritized and will have to wait until the end of the month. Happy new year!