As we enter the new year, here is a goal setting worksheet that a friend shared with me last year. I found it very helpful for 2010, so I thought I would share it here. This year, I think it will be even more effective because I am recording and monitoring my goals using Catch.
After setting up a free online notebook at Catch.com, create an entry where you write down the following things.
1) Guiding Intention: Choose one word to describe an overarching intention for 2011.
2) Special Focus: What would you like to report in January 2012 about your progress and results with this focus and what you expect to achieve in the year?
3) Goals: Create at least one goal in each category. Where possible, make sure these are “SMART” goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-based.
- Career/Financial – Can be both business and personal
- Relationships – Usually has to do with family/friends
- Well Being – Usually has to do with physical condition
- Spiritual – Anything that deals with spiritual/intellectual growth
- Personal – What are you going to do for yourself?
- Wild Card – What doesn’t fit anywhere else?
4) Business Financial Reporting: Create a one-page spreadsheet with rows for key financial indicators and columns for each month and totals for the whole year. Each month, track your budget, forecast, and actuals on this spreadsheet and keep it handy. If you do this using Google Docs, you can create a secret link to the document and include it in your Catch Notes entry.
- Revenue
- Gross Margin
- Profit Before Tax
- Cash Flow
- Cash
- Net Worth/Equity
5) Key Performance Indicators: Write down what you will be tracking as your Key Performance Indicators this year. What are the metrics on your financial/company-performance dashboard that are leading indicators and help you predict your performance? These leading ndicators can be integrated with your one-page monthly financial tracking sheet.
Be sure to write down your goals and keep them someplace that you can easily reference. Catch is useful for this purpose because you will have the key information handy on your iPhone or Android phone and synchronized with your account online.
For the spreadsheet with your financial metrics and key performance indicators, take a screenshot and attach it to your Catch note as an image. That way, you always have a fixed picture of what you were thinking at the beginning of the year.
Another advantage of using Catch for your goals is that whenever you put a hash or number sign in front of a word in your notebook, that word automatically becomes a “hashtag”, which is both a tag or category for organizing your content and a link to all other notes with that hashtag.
I am using the hashtag #Goals so that whenever I make progress with my goals or want to record any related thoughts and ideas, I mark them with the same #Goals tag. Both my original goals for the year and the stream of events, ideas, and progress notes throughout the year always will be with me.