Short-, medium- and long-term goals

In our professional and personal lives, we always set goals: to have a property, a better job and even to start a business; to achieve a certain independence, to learn important knowledge or to travel to see other places. They are simple dreams in the first instance, but they can become palpable realities if we set limits to achieve them. How do we define our goals? Well, we define them according to their order of priority, short, medium or long term duration. Within the question that arises about how to start or put into practice our knowledge we always want to reach the biggest dream; that great peak of our welfare, but we need to go through steps, small goals that will be the basis for gradually approaching what we really want.

Short-term goals.

As you can imagine, short-term goals are proposed to be achieved in a short period of time, approximately a month, a week or days. Usually we do not notice the progress towards our big goal because these are not usually the goal, but the means to achieve it. We can propose something simple both personally and professionally, such as depositing a percentage of our income in a savings account or going to the gym twice a week. On the professional side, we demand specific deadlines for tasks such as redesigning the image of our business, making a work plan or forming a work team.

Strategy.

A good technique for defining objectives is SMART, which stands for the ideal characteristics of short-term objectives; these characteristics are decoded by letter and place us in specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound objectives. It is useless to walk around with a dream in the clouds when the important thing is to make them as attainable as possible to our real possibilities. We also have the key results objectives, so that the objective is clear, and the key results are the procedures with which we measure progress towards it. We can estimate an approximate of what those key results would be but always the time limit is important to keep moving forward.

Medium-term goals.

These types of medium-term goals require more gestation time for our projects, generally spanning months of hard work. Within these medium-term goals we also set small goals that are necessary to accomplish while we have not reached the next deadline. An example of medium term goals would be to change the color of the interior of the house, for which it would take two months dedicating the weekends of work; the short term goals are on the weekends and the long term goal is two months. In this way we can structure how to achieve our goals to understand their use and future results.

Long-term goals.

Long-term goals are where we realize dreams and large-scale objectives that most of the time are not within our reach in the present. Of course, they depend on all the other medium and short term goals that help us to get closer to our vision. Most of these long-term goals are manifested in aspirations such as moving to another country, having a university degree or starting a family. The truth is that most of our goals may undergo modifications or changes over time as our personal level of maturity determines many of the most urgent decisions.

Self-discipline.

Planning for the future is always essential to life's journey. In one way or another we project an advance that manifests itself in conquests of our own will. Dreaming is inevitable when it comes to goals of any kind, but the main resource we must have is self-discipline; through it we learn to organize