Are Your Goals Ongoing or Projects?

Are Your Goals Ongoing or Projects?

…and why it matters!

Do your goals feel like they’re never ending?  That no matter how much you do, you never seem to feel like you’ve succeeded?

I know that feeling.

As I was reviewing my goals recently, it suddenly occurred to me that nearly all of my goals are what I think of as “ongoing goals”. In other words, the need for improvement or maintenance of the goal will never end.

For me, ‘ongoing goals’ are the kind of goals that over time you would expect to become habits, like eating fruit every day, walking 3 miles ever day or perhaps learning 10 new words of a foreign language every day.  In other words, ongoing goals are goals that will just keep on going unless and until you call a halt to them.

While clearly, there will be times when I’ll consider the progress that I’ve made on these types of goals as sufficient or adequate at that point in my life, with some things, such as fitness, health etc, these will slip back without continued maintenance of some sort.

In his book “Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management” Mark Forster refers to ongoing goals as ‘continuous projects’ and defines them as “[a goal] that consists of regular repetition of very much the same sort of action over a relatively long period.  The actions themselves are often the main point of the project.”  He goes on to say “continuous projects take up a regular slice of your day on a long-term basis, so beware of taking on more than a few carefully chosen ones.”

Ongoing Goals

There are many benefits to having ongoing goals, such as:

• You can improve an area of your life over time and not feel overwhelmed.
• You can establish the habits needed and embed that new habit into your routines.
• These types of goals can often be focused on health improvements which is one of the main goals we should all be aiming for.

However, there are a few problems with working on too many ongoing goals at the same time, such as:

• When is enough ever enough?
• There’s no real sense of completion and the feelings of satisfaction that would bring.
• The size of your workload stays static (and big) because nothing really drops off your list due to lack of completion and the ongoing nature of the goal.
• Because of the point above, it’s difficult to find time for new projects you want or need to do.
• Possible tendency to procrastinate due to boredom, resentment at the time it’s taking or slow results.

Project Goals

Now let’s turn our attention to goals that could be deemed “projects”. By their nature these goals have discrete start and end dates, a target to attain or a specific outcome.

Project-type goals are usually self-contained and once they’ve been achieved any actions relating to the goal would drop off your to-do list, thereby freeing up time to move on to something else.

Examples of project-type goals could be:

• Setting up a website.
• Decorating your bedroom.
• Training for and running a marathon.
• Organising and going on a special holiday.

In all of the examples above, the results are easy to articulate, it’s possible to set a start and a (target) end date. The results are also measurable, even if it’s as simple a measure as ‘was the desired result achieved or not?’

Balancing Ongoing and Project Goals

Considering whether your goals are ongoing or projects can be very useful in assessing whether accomplishment of your chosen goals is going to be achievable in the timeframe you’ve set, commonly within a year.

However, for all the reasons given above, if you set goals that are predominantly ongoing, it can make it very difficult to achieve all the outcomes you’re looking for. In simple words, you could be spreading yourself too thin.

This, I believe has been true for my goals for 2023. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of my goals in this way before (or if I have, I’ve forgotten about it!).

This has led me to consider that if all or most my goals are ongoing, then I’m not going to experience those good feelings of completion or experience the novelty of bringing something new onto my plate.

In Real Life…

Out of my 9 goals for 2023, 7 of them are ongoing with no discrete end date or a firm, well-articulated measurable outcome.

So how could I have set better goals as we went into 2023?

I think it’s important to first acknowledge that the goals I set at the beginning of the year were a reflection of where I was and what I felt I needed to make 2023 a better year than the previous one. To a large extent I believe I’ve achieved this overall goal – I feel a lot better about my life in general than I did at the beginning of the year!

But to take this point forward, what practical changes could I have made to my goals so that they were more like projects and less ongoing (even if the overall nature of the goal is that it is something that I would want to keep developing continually).

Using Chunking To Make Ongoing Goals Manageable

The answer to this is to split large, ongoing goals into smaller chunks. Below I’ll talk through some examples.

In hindsight, I could have broken my ongoing goals down into quarterly targets and then monthly targets. However, this would only work if I had some kind of measurable target I was working towards.

Read More In 2023

So, with my goal of reading more in 2023, that could have been quantified as “read 24 books in 2023” which could then be split into quarterly targets and then monthly so that I would know if I was ahead or on track to achieve ‘success’, or indeed if I needed to pick up the pace!

Having an open goal of “read more in 2023” just isn’t tight enough!

Even applying this additional, but simple criteria, changes the goal from being an ongoing-year-long goal to something that is now more like a project goal, making it instantly more practicable.

Thinking about it this way makes it easier to define what success would look like each quarter and each month.

Declutter At Home

The next example could quite easily have been specified in a more measurable way. Here’s the goal as I wrote it for 2023:

To declutter at home, to include clothes, nick-nacks, paper piles and electronic storage.

Over the space of a whole year, this goal could easily have made some good progress, IF, it had been broken down into chunks of quarterly or monthly activity.

In reality, what has happened is that I’ve felt overwhelmed by the goal because it’s just too big and too woolly! My mind has been ruminating over what thing shall I tackle first, when all of those areas need some attention?

Consider instead if I’d had a schedule something like this:

Month	Area	Notes
January	Declutter my wardrobe	Revisit in August
February	Sort and declutter bookshelves	Sell or donate books no longer needed
March	Declutter paper storage in the large container	Shred anything no longer needed and scan anything that isn’t needed in paper format.
April	Review and declutter electronic files on Mac	Revisit in two months, but in meantime only save what’s needed.

 

You can see from the outline above that decluttering at home suddenly becomes much more feasible because there’s not a vague goal called “declutter”.

Looking Forward

It’s important to learn from our past oversights and mistakes and not use them as a stick to beat ourselves with. Yes, I could be so much further forward had I just utilised this simple approach, but, I am where I am, so the best I can do now is to take what I’ve (re)-learned and apply it.

(So you will shortly see a variation of the table above appear in my next goals review!)

2024 and Beyond

In the next couple of months I’ll be starting to think about my 2024 goals. I think 2023 has been a good effort at getting back into the mindset of setting and working towards my goals.

In 2024 even though I’m likely to have some ongoing goals (again), I want to make them far more measurable and will have a plan for the tasks I’d like to achieve each quarter or month.

I’d also like to have some project-like goals with a very specific outcome in the mix, with the aim of having a more balanced set of goals.

I don’t know what these goals are right now, but writing this is motivating and encouraging me to start thinking ahead!

I hope this exploration proves useful in helping you review your goals for 2023 or set your goals for 2024 too.

What to do next…

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