#Weekly Goal Setting Questions#
- What have you accomplished in the last 7 days?
- What do you want to accomplish in the next 7 days?
- What, if any, differences are there between your projected and realized performance, and why?
#Criteria For Good Answers To The Above Questions#
The answers to the first two questions should always be:
##1. CONCRETE##
Every item in your "to do" or "done" list should be a specific thing that you could write down on a checklist and a third party could evaluate your behavior to definitively say "yes, that happened" or "no, that did not happen".
Things that are concrete:
- Design 10 different mailers for sending to real estate agencies
- Call our top 100 clients to ask for referrals
- Walk in to the offices of companies: X, Y, Z and don't leave until an appointment is set to speak to a decision maker.
- Send follow up emails to 6 real estate blogs with the goal of guest posting Rent Application posts on their blogs.
Things that are not sufficiently concerete:
- Think about how to grow revenue
- Evaluate options for new CRM software
- Try harder to
##2. FAILABLE##
Every item should be something that you could fail at. This is really a corollary of "concrete" as any task that is defined unambiguously should be easy to evaluate and say "no, that didn't happen."
Failable:
- Close Fulton Grace Realty
- Get Mark David Realty to process their first rental application
- Deploy a first working version of the white label for testing
Not Failable:
- Continue with marketing efforts
- Evaluate code base
- Refactor code base
- Clean up internal wiki
##3. NON-REPEATING##
If the same task is in your list for multiple periods and you've repeatedly claimed success on it, it's not a good one.
For example:
"Prospect for 50 potential clients"
could show up in your list every week, and you could add 50 potential clients to the list every week. That's a repeating success, so it fails the criteria for a good task.
Instead, be more specific:
"Find the top 50 potential clients in Orange County, CA"
Things that are not sufficiently concrete will often end up being repeating.
Other bad repeating examples vs their better counterpart:
- "write more unit tests" vs "write unit tests for X, Y, Z" (specific things like "make sure file uploads work and are properly permissioned", "accepting/rejecting applications in the UI changes the application status in the DB")
- "write more support blog posts" vs "write support blog posts for how to triage broken reports"
If you are repeating them because you are failing them or not doing them, that's an acceptably defined task, but we should separately evaluate why you're consistently/repeatedly failing that task.
##4. ACTION ORIENTED##
Tend towards action oriented tasks, as opposed to results oriented tasks (your actions should still be in the pursuit of a specific goal, though). This won't always be possible/easy, but try your best.
Action oriented items are things that YOU can do.
For example: "Make Bamboo Realty Group happy" is something that's not directly in your control (though a good result). "Respond to Bamboo emails within 2 hours, offer to schedule a call at the owner's convenience, and send the office doughnuts." are specific actions within your control that can be executed with the desired outcome of "Make Bamboo Realty Group happy".
For action oriented tasks, failure is your fault/something you could have prevented. For results oriented tasks, failure can be blamed on someone else.
Good action oriented tasks:
- Complete two full customer support ticket sessions in person with Ashley
- Finish writing deployment guide for Rent Application codebase.
- Connect with Joe from JD Palatine, Bob from Select Data Solutions -- ask why they aren't already referring us traffic and find out what it will take to get them moving ASAP.
- Compile a list of the heads of every Keller Williams agency in Ohio.
Bad action oriented tasks:
- Get Mark David Realty to run their first application
- Convert 10 new property management agencies
Improvements on the bad ones:
- Call Joe, the leasing manager of Mark David every day to ask if he has any new applications he's expecting that day, then ask him if he can use Rent Application for those applications. Send his wife flowers so he won't be pissed off.
- Follow up with each of KW Orange County, Coldwell Banker Miami, Koenig Rubloff Cincinnati -- find out either (a) they definitely don't want to use RA, or (b) what it would take to get them on board next week.
##5. AMBITIOUS##
Your list of goals should be optimistic, ambitious, aggressive.
A sane person with a "regular" job should say "holy shit you're not going to finish that" to the list of things you say you're going to do.
A sane person with a "regular" job should say "wtf, how did you possibly accomplish all that in one week?!?"
We're small. We can't afford dead weight. Normal corporate jobs expect low efficiency, but that just won't work here.
Meeting goals because you have a low bar isn't something to be proud of.
If you're completing all of your tasks every week, then your task list wasn't ambitious enough.
Aim to be unable to complete all your tasks about 50% of the time.