I think that long-term goals should be qualitative and subjective, and supported by short-term goals that are quantitative and objective. I like my short-term goals to be achievable within 12 weeks at the outside, and preferably much less.
One reason for this is that as I learn by pursuing and achieving short-term goals, my outlook on the long term changes. Another reason is that the pursuit of long-term goals is hindered by getting stressed out over specific numbers or metrics, and made easier by pushing the edge of my subjective performance envelope. In other words, if I’m always trying to perform such that I feel mostly positive (which isn’t necessarily the same as feeling good!) close to the point where I start to fail, I’m building a long-term positive association with my goal while incrementally improving.
This is easiest for me to illustrate with athletic goals. One of my long-term goals for 2015 is to feel physically light and subjectively strong. One of my short-term goals in support of this is to do 10 reps of the strict overhead press with 95 pounds at a bodyweight of 150 or less. Right now this seems subjectively hard, but I know from experience that I am probably less than 8 weeks from achieving it. When I get there, I’ll make another short-term goal based on how I feel subjectively about the long term goal. This is probably too big a short-term bite for an area of practice in which one has little experience; I have many years of physical training experience to go on in making these goals. Some years ago when I had a long-term goal of getting back into coding, my short-term goals were things like “learn how to split a string in Python”: something that I should be able to achieve in one sitting.
I think that long-term goals should be qualitative and subjective, and supported by short-term goals that are quantitative and objective. I like my short-term goals to be achievable within 12 weeks at the outside, and preferably much less.
One reason for this is that as I learn by pursuing and achieving short-term goals, my outlook on the long term changes. Another reason is that the pursuit of long-term goals is hindered by getting stressed out over specific numbers or metrics, and made easier by pushing the edge of my subjective performance envelope. In other words, if I’m always trying to perform such that I feel mostly positive (which isn’t necessarily the same as feeling good!) close to the point where I start to fail, I’m building a long-term positive association with my goal while incrementally improving.
This is easiest for me to illustrate with athletic goals. One of my long-term goals for 2015 is to feel physically light and subjectively strong. One of my short-term goals in support of this is to do 10 reps of the strict overhead press with 95 pounds at a bodyweight of 150 or less. Right now this seems subjectively hard, but I know from experience that I am probably less than 8 weeks from achieving it. When I get there, I’ll make another short-term goal based on how I feel subjectively about the long term goal. This is probably too big a short-term bite for an area of practice in which one has little experience; I have many years of physical training experience to go on in making these goals. Some years ago when I had a long-term goal of getting back into coding, my short-term goals were things like “learn how to split a string in Python”: something that I should be able to achieve in one sitting.