Stay on track with goals

Before we get to the heart of using project milestones for our goals, we first need to look at what a goal is. A goal’s purpose is to take something you are not satisfied with and create actionable steps to achieve your desired result. Common goals include achieving a weight gain or loss, making financial purchases, or finishing a personal endeavor like running a marathon. Therefore, choosing project milestones is key to reaching your desired goal. This helps you stay on track and keep you focused when achieving that goal may seem impossible. A goal’s purpose is to change something permanently, for the better. If you set a goal to save $10,000 over the next twelve months, the purpose is to change from being a spender into a saver.

You may say that a goal to complete a full-course marathon (26.2 miles) would be complete once you finish the marathon. I would argue that, on the contrary, completing a full-course marathon has turned you into a marathon runner. This contrasts with a project. A project is something you do in a given period. Once complete, you move on to the next project. For instance, you may have a project to create a marketing campaign. Once the campaign finishes, the campaign is over. Done. You may have learned a few things along the way, but for all intents and purposes, the project is finished, and you move on to the next one. A goal is your higher purpose, and a milestone is a way to measure your progress. To give you an example. Imagine you set the goal to save $10,000 in 2022, starting on the first of January. You could set a monthly milestone of $834.00 sent to savings. This way, you ensure that you have sufficient funds at the end of each month to send $834.00 to your savings account. However, milestones are not always as simple to set. For example, let’s take the marathon running goal. How would you set milestones to achieve that goal?

It would depend on where you are starting. If you are already a runner, running five miles may not seem very much of a milestone. You may already. However, you could set yourself milestones for running a 10K race and a half-marathon (13.1 miles). In this scenario, you would give yourself six months to prepare for your marathon. After two months, you want to run a 10k race in under one hour. That would be your milestone and then, set a milestone to run a half-marathon in under two hours at the five-month mark. Meaningful goals need to be beyond your current abilities—they need to stretch you. By “stretch”, I mean they have to pull you out of your comfort zone to help you expand your capabilities. Often, when we set a goal, we have no idea how to achieve it; all we know is we want to achieve it. If you set a goal to become the CEO of your company within the next ten years, but currently, you are on the lower rungs of your company’s corporate ladder, it may seem impossible. However, if you break that goal down into milestones, you could set a milestone to be a manager of your own department after two years—a much more realistic achievement.

Once you achieve that milestone, you would set yourself the milestone of becoming a director and then on to the leadership team. Milestones are stepping stones towards a bigger goal. All you need to do is focus on the next milestone. If you focus on achieving your milestones, then step by step, you move closer to your bigger goal. It’s more motivating because the next step is always just a few months away.

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