How to Achieve Your Objectives - 2015

Date: 01/01/2015

By the time you receive this publication you should have already made your budget and established your objectives for the year ahead. If not, you certainly do it now whether or not it is mandated by your boss. Establishing both personal and job objectives is an important step to help you achieve them. New Year’s resolutions are a sort of objective making-process, just not as formal.

But establishing the objectives is only a first step. You need to plan how those objectives are going to be accomplished, and it is essential to monitor your progress during the year to make sure you achieve them. Good objectives should be quantifiable, where possible, and have a time factor for accomplishment.

Your plan should include the time increment when you will check your progress. In some cases you may want to check your progress daily. In other cases it is best to check weekly or monthly what results have been obtained. If you don’t do this you will suddenly find that most of the year has gone by and it is really too late to achieve the objective for the year.

When you check progress and find you are not on schedule, you can take steps to remedy the situation. You can spend more time on a project, you can delegate certain portions of the work to help you get where you want to be, or change the way you are working. Changing priorities to achieve the most important tasks first could also help.

It is difficult if you are not familiar with working with budgets or working toward goals, but it becomes easier once you get used to the idea and get into a habit of continually looking at results. You will find that you achieve much more when you follow a plan. You will get more work done, obtain bigger savings, and reduce costs and get lower prices from your supplier if you plan your cost reduction objectives.

Without a plan, any achievements are only a matter of luck. With a plan you are more likely to reach your objectives.