Goal Setting: Categorizing and Prioritizing Business, Family, and Personal Goals, Study notes of Agricultural engineering

Download Goal Setting: Categorizing and Prioritizing Business, Family, and Personal Goals and more Study notes Agricultural engineering in PDF only on Docsity! 1 What kind of goals are there? One way to categorize goals is by their subject matter. Just as a chart of accounts is useful for categorizing similar accounts together, we can use the broad categories of business, family, and personal goals to gather similar goals. These categories may overlap, and some goals may be equally at home in two categories, but you should pick one category for the goal. Your family and personal goals may be difficult to distinguish, but it should be pretty easy to separate business goals from family and personal. One of the primary goals of the ABM program is to help business owners divide business from the rest of their lives. It is essential to separate your goals into at least business and personal categories. If you decide to modify your business pursuits, or get out of the business altogether, you still have family and personal goals. We can assume that most of them would not change and would still be reachable if the business changed. Business Goals-the goals of the business. These goals are usually the most measurable, and the outcomes are most easily compared to other businesses. The language of business goals is simpler. Examples: To increase net business income by $xxx in the next business year. To spend no more than $xxx on inputs. To market my product in the top third of the market. To enter my transactions as written instead of waiting for the bank statement. Family goals-these goals have to do with your family. While the emphasis of this class is obviously on managing the business, it is important to know your goals for the family. Examples: Develop and stick to a family budget. Write a savings plan for the kids' college needs. Plan for and take a 10-day vacation. Write or update our estate plan. Remodel the kitchen. Personal Goals-these are the goals that have to do with the self. Goals in this category are frequently called "personal improvement" goals, but shouldn't be considered merely a laundry list of all the things you want to improve about yourself. They can and should include your "dreams" of "some day." If you "have always wanted to" do something, chances are it is a dream ready to be expressed as a goal. Examples: Be able to find something efficiently on the Internet. Spend one evening a week with my spouse and family. Become more organized by handling papers only once. Finish building the ship in the bottle. Sort your goals by how far into the future they go Another good way to categorize goals is to arrange them by the time limit for reaching them. Many people suggest categories of short, intermediate, and long-term goals. Short term would generally be anywhere from one week to one year away. Intermediate would be from one year to five, and long term goals would be greater than five. These divisions are arbitrary, and a person's definitions of short, intermediate, and long term will vary with others, and perhaps with a person's 2 own previous definitions. In any case they are used as a useful guide, a framework for thinking about goals. We suggest you write your long term goals first, then your intermediate and short term goals can be steps toward the long term goal. There of course will be self-contained intermediate and short term goals, but there should be some pieces of your long term goals listed in your intermediate and short term goals. You should have some goals for each of the nine boxes below. Business goals Family Goals Personal Long term Intermediate Short term Putting it all together Setting goals is a process with individual steps. The most important step, writing goals, is the first. But if you don't follow through with the rest of the steps, it will be difficult to reach your goals. Like the business plan itself, setting goals is a circular process. The length of the cycle may be different for each goal, but for sure you should work with your goals at least once a year. Steps in the goal setting process