This post covers:
- The "Concrete Goals Tracker" tool
- The standard "concrete goals" and their priorities / scores
- A few minor criticisms
- Why it's still a brilliant idea
The "Concrete Goals Tracker" tool
The key thing of interest that this raised for me was the question of turning goals into "concrete" things. This is always an interesting challenge that I spend a lot of time on (defining performance measures, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and so on are something many people in business get extremely hung up on - often without really stopping to think about why they're doing it in the first place).
The standard "concrete goals" and their priorities / scores
This goals tracker has a standard set of principles used to "score" activities you've completed based on which goals they have contributed towards. You can come up with your own list, but David's standard list is:
10 points - It's life-sustaining, billable work!
10 points - It's signing new business!
5 points - It's publishable code! Ship it!
5 points - It's sharp visual design! Show it!
5 points - It's concrete planning or accounting!
2 points - It's new self-promotion!
2 points - It's a new article for the blog!
2 points - It's social or business development!
1 point - It's maintaining an old relationship!
1 point - It's making a new relationship!
A few minor criticisms
Ok, so first, some of these clearly aren't relevant to everyone. I've not written any code in years and do not run software delivery projects, so anything about publishing code isn't really relevant for me.
Likewise, I'm not totally sure about the level of priority. As a consultant, building new relationships is a very important activity to me, and something I often don't place enough focus on, so I might bump this a bit higher on my list.
Finally, it doesn't cover all of the bases i.e. it's very much work-focussed. I think this is actually the right thing to do if it's something that you're using purely for managing tasks at work, but if you're setting your life principles, I'd at least expect something in there about your health (which again, is something I often miss off because I'm too focussed on work - so I'm raising it because I know it's something I often fail on!)
It's a brilliant idea
All of the criticisms above kind of miss the point though.
David makes it clear that you can tweak this tool to your own needs.
The key concept is: first work out your priorities, then on a regular basis, make sure that whenever you do a task you think about how that task aligns to your goals.
This provides a way of: aligning your daily activities to your longer-term goals; tracking progress against your longer-term goals; highlighting how well you're doing to cut out tasks you keep doing that aren't well enough aligned, or make decisions on things you could do instead of the things you normally do, in order to make more progress.
BTW - this is the very first of my "Daily Rubbish" posts. Hope you enjoyed it!
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