In a previous post I put out some thought on goals. I mentioned that I would give some insight on tasklists. Here I will introduce the concepts of tasklists and strategies and how they work together to reach your goals.
Tasklists.
A tasklist can come in many different forms. For me it’s a simple piece of paper with scribbled down things I plan to accomplish. I usually set this up daily although you can have tasklists that expand to longer periods of time. This sounds awfully similar to goals and many people interchange these terms. For me, I keep them separate because I believe there really is a difference.
Strategies.
A strategy is the middle man between goals and tasks. To define a strategy you look at your goal and decide on ways that you want to achieve these goals. These are then your strategies.
Tasks, Strategies, and Goals, the perfect team.
Tasks and strategies work together to obtain your goals. Think of your goal as Lego set. Think of the strategies as all the pieces in that Lego set that if put together will make that cool looking model on the box. Then, think of the instructions as the tasklist. If you use the instructions to put the pieces together your goal of having that cool looking Lego model will be done before you know it. However, say you’re missing one of the pieces, or maybe missing the instructions..reaching that goal just became a whole lot hard if not impossible.
Let me give you a quick example of how these parts can work together.
Goal: Increase RSS subscribers by 101 in one months time.
Strategies:
- Publish quality posts daily.
- Expand audience through advertising.
- Run contest.
Now that I have my goal and some of the strategies that I want to you use. I can now start making a tasklists that relate to my strategies. The following is a sample daily tasklist.
Tasklist.
- Write 3 quality posts.
- Contact 2 potential contest sponsors.
- Find 5 new websites to advertise on.
One thing I wanted to point out is that every task has to be detailed, leaving little to interpretation. The reason behind this is if one of your tasks is “contact potential contest sponsors” without giving yourself a quantity, you may reason with yourself that finding one is good enough.
The main thing to understand is that a goal may seem impossible to reach but as with all things in life if you take things step by step it you end up where you want to before you know it. That’s exactly what strategies and tasks do for us. They give us manageable steps to obtaining our goal. If you reverse it, goals give us the motivation and drive to finish these tasks, no matter how much we would rather be doing something else.
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 6th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
next step is ACTION! ;), which is actually one of the most important steps which a lot of people is finding hard to implement.
let me know if you need some EC credits for your contest.
erics last blog post..December 3 Is Blog Comment Day!
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You seem to have a good strategy to bring your blog to the next level. All the best and may you reach your goals sooner than later.
Yan
PS: if you need a sponsor, shoot me an email.
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I love the idea of the task list, although I’m not familiar with pen/paper.
Dennis Edells last blog post..Your Link Just Got MORE Valuable!
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i almost agree with you. i want to add one element which is analysis.
analysis is a important process to determine our achievement. I guess that some webmaster know about Google analytic. I’m not expert yet but learn fast and adapt the surrounding input.
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Love your task-based approach, there’s a lot of self-help spin out there but justing read your post through now, I’ve got several projects on the go and taking time to define what I want to achieve + how I plan to get it done has been really helpful,, thanks man.
You mention places to advertise, do you use paid ads on other blogs for example, or free promotional methods? Also the blog contests is a great idea to get links, comments, subscribers, and general goodwil, this is something I gotta try. Another subscriber added
I stuck you on my blogroll over at http://seocialize.com, good luck with your site and keep up the great work.
SEOcialize - Searach Engine Optimizations last blog post..Oil Men & Oil Prices
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I like this post, because I put together lots of lists and goals myself. I will say, though, that I’m not sure everything has to be overly detailed. There has to be enough room to be flexible at a moment’s notice, because sometimes it’s obvious that either the goal or the task to get there isn’t going to work once you get into it.
Mitchs last blog post..Maintenance Day
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Christian Reply:
December 15th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Hi Mitch,
In regards to details, I feel that you need them to measure your accomplishment. Of course goals are just lists of things you want to accomplish so they are never set in stone and they are 100% flexible but if you don’t have a set standard it’s way easier to cheat yourself.
I understand where you’re coming from though. Even now as I am re-designing this blog I have had to be flexible as ideas and flow through and I already can see me making changes even as the design goes live. The point of the post though is that goals give you a standard to aim for. The road to get to that standard will change and things won’t always go as you plan but having the details will give you a starting point.
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I like the way you define the hierarchy goals - strategies - tasks. I think many people leave out the strategies analysis and it makes it much more difficult to reach or exceed our goals unless we have a set of tasks that must be accomplished.
Instead of “tasks” I tend to think of these as “action steps,” because it reminds me that I have to take action on each step before the task is completed. I know it’s just semantics, but it works for me. (I tend to want to complete an action step, but somehow dread the thought of undertaking a task.)
I tend to break the action steps into even smaller sub-steps on most things I do. The more action steps I can check off in any given time, the easier it is to maintain motivation and momentum.
I tend to agree with Mitch that we have to be flexible and frequently what we’re doing to reach a goal may change drastically with no warning.
Still, I find it easier to sit down with my action steps and modify them on one or more pieces of paper before changing the direction of what I’m doing. That way, even if it takes a few minutes (or even a few hours), I’m armed with a definite set of steps that I must do to move in the new direction.
I learned to do this a long time ago, because it is very easy when planning how to complete a project to get distracted and pulled off course. By having all my action steps (or tasks) defined ahead of time, it is easier to resume where I should be if one part of the project falls apart and has to be redesigned.
Even for relatively simple goals, I find it useful to define precisely what I want to accomplish before I sit down to work.
Of course, different strokes for different folks still applies.
For a large project, I drop paper and pen and move to the computer. That’s where a real project management program comes in handy. I like to work with timelines and critical paths if more than one person is involved. Being able to define tasks and milestones, along with deadlines and assignment of responsibility can make a mess much more manageable.
I know that’s way outside the scope of what you’re talking about, but I wanted to mention it because it has pulled my bacon out of the fire more than once.
Thanks for a thought provoking post.
Act on your dream!
JD
John Dilbecks last blog post..Have you seen Twitter Me Fun?
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Christian Reply:
December 17th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Hey John,
I’m glad you enjoyed the read. Everyone has their approach at accomplishing things, I just put forth my take on the subject and hoped that it would inspire others to start to organize their visions on some level. Your comment leaves me feeling that it did it’s job!
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Thanks for posting this..
Having strategies and task list are very good tips. By doing that, i think it will be less difficult in attaining our goals..:) By the way, check out an inspirational video called “My Wish” by Donna Sirianni on YouTube. It’s all about starting at the very beginning of achieving your dreams in life…and enjoying the journey!! Send this video link to all your friends! They will be inspired by it! See the video here -> http://www.mywishthemovie.com
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