I like to think of myself as a productive person. I have a list of tasks and prioritize to get those tasks accomplished. However, I have suffered failures by not defining my productivity for a specific purpose. Internally, I knew that my time needed to have a purpose, but I tended to be productive without a clear purpose.
Thankfully, I realized that I needed to communicate effectively with my team at work to understand the extent of this problem. Thankfully, a recent internal survey of my team showed me how I was doing things incorrectly. In the survey, one colleague stated, “You are ambitious, but you lack a driven mentality. Great leaders are both ambitious and driven”. He was right. I am determined, but I lacked clear goals. I needed to change.
This article aims to show a journey in working to have a clear production with an objective through setting clear, specific goals, planning correctly, and prioritization with your mission and vision.
Set clear, specific goals
For a while now, I have found it difficult to SMART goals. In the recent companies I have worked for, we would have to set the objective of building a particular product, but later, the product would not meet our expectations on the market due to its limited demand.
As an alternative, currently, we set small goals that we can measure the demand for the product in the market first. Our team clearly outlines the expectations we will achieve in building the product, come up with a test hypothesis, and also research on the demand of the product. After reviewing the done study and with the outcome of the few products released on the market, we can determine whether, if we build the product, it will achieve our set expectations or not. It becomes more productive to have a specific goal because it becomes easy to realize it.
In furthering our goal, we did set bi-annual goals with the aim of achieving higher productivity. We made the objectives easy to recall by selecting 4 ‘S’ for 2020.
To add on, I like Jeff Boss’ stand in his Forbes article on goal setting, “Having a clear, compelling goal mobilizes your focus toward actionable behavior. In other words, goal setting should motivate you.”
Plan Properly
In my experience, I have learned that small projects may not need a lot of planning, and I don’t say it’s not required. The logic necessary for these small projects is concise, with little erraticism. For the larger projects, you need to take our time and plan for them purposely. This is the only way to help them succeed.
When we began to build a Savvy debt payoff planner, I recognized that we would require more determined planning to have the application perform well for users. It was not an easy task. Therefore, we needed to build this tool that will help people achieve debt freedom and save extra money as compared to existing applications. As such, embracing planning was critical.
Prioritize with Your Mission and Vision:
Our mission and vision at Ascend Finance began as a tool to help take the pain out of personal finance by giving simple, technology-focused solutions to our customers. It wasn’t an appealing or especially eye-catching mission and vision in any way. Our lead engineer did some studying and read Made To Stick. He then understood that it was a hard task to filter all that we build based on the vision.
We updated our vision to help make it the journey of relieving the individual from loans in a stress-free, economical, and more rapid manner. After having an explicit purpose, we were able to check all our ideas again and ensure they remain on the goal of achieving a debt-free life in a stress-free and economical way
In having a clear purpose, the company has been able to be more productive because we have deprioritized things that would not help us realize our goal.
Ben Tejes is the co-founder of Savvy Debt Payoff Planner and writes for BCAB with the goal to help lead people to achieve debt and financial freedom. He covers topics such as Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Utah, Chapter 7 Bankruptcy Process, and Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Wisconsin. When not working, Ben enjoys going on adventures with his wife and three young daughters.
