Goal Tracking: Building mindfulness into setting and staying on top of our professional goals

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1 Goal Tracking: Building mindfulness into setting and staying on top of our professional goals Keeping the eye on the prize This assignment has four main parts and each has a worksheet. It s intended to be a tool that you can come back to over time to choose and track your progress toward a goal. It s best suited for goals related to building a habit. Consider working through these steps with an Accountability Partners. 1. Picking a Goal: Select one goal to build a habit in any one of the three domains: (art-making or writing routine/ sharing your work routine/relationship building routine). Think of something you do repeatedly, that if you made a change (either starting or stopping the behavior), it would make other things in your life easier or unnecessary. 2. Phrasing Goals: Use a SMART goal framework to break down your big goal into smaller steps. Breaking down your goals into achievable steps can transform a vague idea to an actionable task. 3. Tracking Progress: Choose an app or printed template to update every time you make progress on your goal. 3. Reviewing: Harness the value of tracking when you commit to regularly reviewing progress made. This review process allows you to see patterns of your behavior and environment. You ll see what s working, what s not. You can choose to celebrate progress and continue on to your larger goal, or choose to make changes to the goal itself, the tracking process, or to your environment.

2 You manage what you measure - Gretchen Rubin 1. Part 1: Picking a goal: Not sure about what goal to pick? What s the one regular activity you could do, each day or week (Set up a writing or painting schedule, Post once a day on Instagram, Go to screenings or openings regularly, etc), that by doing it would bring you closer to your larger goals? Still can t decide? Consider choosing a repeated task that often falls under the Important but not Urgent The challenge of the IBNU (Important but not Urgent): What makes it especially challenging to focus on these IBNU tasks is that their due dates have either not been set or are too far out in the future. In order to be able to cater to this shorter time horizon, we need to itemize our goals into small, achievable, repeating chunks that are tracked to completion.

3 Why is the goal important to you? Part 2. Phrasing SMART Goals: Begin by articulating your goal and review it against the SMART(er) criteria: Specific/Shiny - Is your goal well defined? Where and how often will you work on this goal? How can you make this goal more exciting? Measurable - Can you measure incremental or overall progress against this goal? Actionable - Is your goal related to the results or the actions YOU can take to accomplish the results? Make it about the action that YOU can take, not what your intended desirable outcome is. Realistic/Relevant - Is this goal achievable by you given your current workload, environment and skill level? What is the goal you are likely to achieve? Big and audacious or small and realistic? Is this goal relevant to your bigger life goals? Time Bound - What is the time frame within which you will achieve this goal? What is your goal per week and how many weeks do you want to achieve this goal before you re-evaluate? Evaluate/Environment - When will you re-evaluate this goal? How does your current environment support this goal? Reward - What reward will you use to keep yourself going? Remember to not let the reward undermine progress made pursuing your goal.

4 This example shows you how you can state a goal using the SMARTer criteria and then incrementally increase your targets based on your performance every week.

5 GOING DEEPER Think back to a time when you struggled with staying on track with a project or sticking with a habit - How could rephrasing that goal have helped you? Is perfectionism getting in the way when you try to break down a goal? What is your perfectionism telling you?

6 How will you remind yourself to stay committed to your newly restated single goal as opposed to the brand of goal setting that our perfectionism tries to get us to adopt? (Composing music for 30 min/day is better goal and writing a masterpiece 30min/day) Tracking Progress Choose an app or a printed template to update every time you make progress on your goals. Mark an X or STAR each time you meet your goal. By recording incremental progress, a vague, far into the future task can seem more accessible and encourage you to stick with it despite the daily stream of urgent and important requests on your plate.

7 Part 4. Review Harness the value of tracking with a regular commitment to reviewing progress made and making changes to the goal itself, the tracking process or your environment. Every week, review your progress. Reflect on what made it easy or difficult to achieve the task at hand. Then ask yourself the following questions: Do you need to simplify this goal or restate it in any way? Is this tracking process working for you the way you have designed it or are you better off using something else (like an app) that caters to your specific needs? Is there anything you can do in your immediate environment to make achieving your goals easier? For example: Can you set up your writing area, free from distractions in a particular area of your house so that you can start quickly? Can you use the power of accountability to nudge yourself into writing? Are there emotions, fears of failure, etc. that are keeping you from starting or continuing with this task?