ACCOMPLISH THAT DREAM WITH LONG- TERM GOALS
Your goal gives you a concrete benchmark to measure progress and determine whether or not you’ve achieved your objective.
When you think of an ideal future for your work, what do you see? Perhaps you envision yourself launching a new global product, hitting record sales numbers, or recruiting the best talent in your field. But while it’s easy to imagine those dream scenarios, actually getting there is another story. That’s where long-term goals can help.
Setting long-term goals helps turn your daydreams into concrete objectives that you can work towards with intention. Aside from helping you achieve difficult things, they’re also a useful tool to prioritize your work and decide what success looks like for you.
What are long-term goals?
Long-term goals are objectives you want to achieve in the future, months or years down the road. They’re difficult to accomplish and require advance planning and consistent work over a long period of time—like turning your small idea into a big and renowned one.
Long-term goals vs. short-term goals
Long-term goals gives you direction and purpose. They’re usually made up of smaller short-term goals, which are the stepping stones that help you accomplish your larger goals. While long-term goals are your north star, short-term goals make the work feel less daunting by breaking it up into actionable steps.
Is it important to set long-term goals?
Long-term goals can help you tackle big objectives at work and in your personal life. Here’s how.
Work with intention
Defining a purpose is essential to a successful growth strategy. After all, when you’re clear about what you want, you’re much more likely to get it.
Long-term goals help with that clarity, because setting them encourages you to intentionally decide what kind of future you’re striving for. Instead of working aimlessly, long-term goals give you focus and ensure that your daily work is chipping away at something that really matters.
Define success
When you set a long-term goal, you’re deciding what success looks like to you. Your goal gives you a concrete benchmark to measure progress and determine whether or not you’ve achieved your objective.
Make better decisions
Picture this: you’re walking aimlessly around town, and are faced with a split in the road. Do you go left or right? Since you don’t have a destination in mind, that decision is much harder to make. When you’re headed to a specific location, the choice is easy—just take the road that leads where you want to go.
While many decisions aren’t as simple as left or right, a long-term goal can be your compass. When you’re faced with a choice, you can evaluate how each option might help you reach your goal.
Stay motivated
Long-term goals are also a powerful motivational tool. When psychologists tested the impact of different motivational techniques on group performance, they found goal setting was one of the most effective. Just setting a handful of specific, ambitious goals boosted the participants’ performance into the 80th percentile.
Specifically, long-term goals help with intrinsic motivation—the drive to succeed that comes from within yourself, rather than external factors like praise or compensation. That’s because when you’re striving towards long-term goals, your day-to-day activities has a clear purpose.
5 steps to set and achieve long-term goals
The best long-term goals take a bit of planning. Here’s how to create goals and stick with them for the long haul.
1. Visualize your ideal future
Before you create your goals, you have to decide what you want to achieve. Keep in mind that long-term goals are a big commitment. To create goals you can stick with, make sure they really matter to you and align with your values. This helps you stay motivated and avoid burnout.
2. Prioritize your goals
Now that you’ve set goals, it’s time to prioritize them. It can be tempting to try and tackle all your objectives at once, but that’s usually not realistic. You have to take into account what resources are available—including your own personal bandwidth.
To prioritize, start by listing out all your long-term goals. Highlight which ones are most important to you. Make a note of when you want to achieve each goal, and estimate how long it will take. Based on those factors, decide which goals you want to focus on right away, and which ones you’ll put on hold until more bandwidth opens up.
3. Break your long-term goals into short-term goals
Long-term goals take hard work to achieve, so it’s normal for them to feel a bit daunting at first. That’s where short-term goals come into play. These smaller stepping stones break the work down into bite-sized tasks you can tackle within a shorter time frame, such as a day, week, or month.
To set short-term goals, write down all the tasks you need to accomplish in order to reach your long-term goal. Think of them as dependencies—hitting these goals unblocks your ultimate, long-term goal.
4. Make a plan to track your progress
In order for long-term goals to be effective, they should be connected to your day-to-day work. That means instead of setting and forgetting your goals, make a plan to regularly check in and update your progress—for example, at the end of each day or week. And with the short-term goals you’ve set, it will be easier to gauge your progress and determine if you’re on track for your long-term goals.
5. Be flexible
Things change, and that’s okay. When you plan to achieve something months or years down the road, it’s normal for unexpected events to knock things off track—or for your own perspective and goals to shift. Keep in mind that your long-term goals aren’t set in stone. Rather, they’re a living document that you can adjust over time.
Staying flexible with your goals can also help when unexpected opportunities arise. Sometimes if you fixate on a specific outcome, it can be easy to overlook promising growth opportunities.
Regardless of what you want to achieve, long-term goals can help you get there. Setting long-term objectives gives structure to dreams that may have previously seemed out of reach, and empowers you to strategically tackle them over time. And with these steps, you can stop dreaming, start planning, and tackle those big goals once and for all.