“Breaking Down Goals Into Actionable Milestones Help You Increase Productivity”
Everyone has a big goal that seems evident until they finally try it. One of the most significant issues regarding setting goals is to keep them at a high level. Creating a successful product is everyone’s dream, but success itself is too general. It will be challenging to measure the progress of success. The act of breaking down a goal into milestones ensure you adapt to changes and lowering the risk of having a product that does not fit the market.
Why Do You Need To Break Goals Into Milestones?
Breaking goals limit your risk to only that milestone, and it allows you to do more iteration of improvements. With small goals that lead to your ultimate goal, you’re consistently taking steps toward achieving the life you desire. Breaking down goals into a daily or weekly achievement helps you focus. On the foundation level, breaking goals help you in risk management, resource management, and time management. To help you gain more knowledge in breaking your goals into a milestone, we have summed up the detail below in this article.
Risk Management
Risk management is the process of identifying, assessing, and controlling threats.
- Risk Identification: You should know and define the potential risks that may negatively influence your goal.
- Risk Analysis: Doing an analysis helps you understand each specific instance of risk and how can it affect your goal.
- Risk Assesment: The risk is then further evaluated after determining the risk’s overall likelihood of occurrence to make decisions.
- Risk Controlling: Following up on both the risk and your goal to track new and existing threats.
Imagine if you build a house without a milestone; where you only check your house only when it’s done. If there’s a mistake, you would have a hard time fixing it. It will also take more time to find out exactly what’s wrong with your house. Compare it via checking if all is good every milestone or so (foundation, walls, electricity). Even if there’s a problem, you will have lesser impact thank checking it only at the end of the goal.
Resource Management
Resource management is the process to help you manage your various resources effectively. Those resources can be intangible (people and time) and tangible (equipment, materials, and money). If you don’t breakdown your goals into a milestone, it will make it harder for you to put the right resources that are assigned to the right task.
Breakdown your resources (people and money) to match your milestone. Understand what you need for the current milestone to reduce the risk of overspending. Spend on what you need to spend on each milestone, proportionally to the total resources budget for the end goal.
Time Management
Time management is the process of planning and controlling how much time you need to reach your goals. Proper time management enables you to complete your goal in a shorter amount of time for a lower level of stress. These are the benefits of having time management:
- Stress relief: As you breakdown your goals, your to-do-list becomes more apparent and achievable. This will give you comfort and show that you are making tangible progress.
- More opportunities: Managing time will lead you to more opportunities that can be done because less time is wasted on trivial activities.
- Ability to realize goals: With proper time management, you can achieve goals and objective better, and to do so in a shorter amount of time.
Time management might not go linear as resource management would do (one can spend 60% time to do research and plan, and do 40% on execution). Adjust the number to your liking and situation. Try to know how you usually work first, before deciding on the proportion of the work to minimize the time waste.
Conclusion
Breaking your goal into milestone helps you limit your risk and have a more controlled output. Having a smaller to-do-list or a milestone helps you see and realize that your ultimate goal is not that unreachable. Always remind yourself to stick with your daily or even weekly milestone. Focus on your big motivation for the goal. Why is this goal important to you? Imagine what it will feel like to accomplish it. Big goals can only be achieved with the first small step.
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References:
https://www.wendaful.com/2017/12/breaking-down-goals/
https://searchcompliance.techtarget.com/definition/risk-management
https://www.shopify.com/encyclopedia/resource-management
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/careers/soft-skills/time-management-list-tips/