The UnSub

This entry is a reminder to myself, hopefully it is useful for the reader too. There are times I often wonder why there is much activities but not much progress in my life.

One day, I came across this acronym S.M.A.R.T from “Art of project management” by Scott Berkun. It is an excellent book written by an ex-Microsoft manager. Although the context is about software engineering & project management, there are tips that are general to other aspects of life.

One interesting topic is goal setting. We should always go for S.M.A.R.T goals. Who likes D.U.M.B goals anyway, but let’s focus on the smart ones.

Specific
I believe you have heard many times (especially from the ladies) “I wanna be in shape”, but what exactly is “in shape”? Compare general statements with specific goals: “I want to be rich…” v.s. “I want to make my first million by 30s…”

Specific goals should cover most of “What and Why and When And How and Where and Who”. It is pointless to set goals if we do not know what we want to do, why we are doing it, when to get it done, how it is done, where to get it done and who are involved.

Measurable
A couple of friends ask me about setting up own blogs & websites. I asked “how would you keep yourself motivated to keep on writing?”. Obviously for some, they don’t really care and after a while they would give up since most of the time they didn’t figure out why they want to do it and how many readers are reading.

It make sense to set goals that you can measure, in the case of blogs, the number of readers, the links…, the traffic in terms of hits. It is important to identity the variable(s) to measure for your goals.

Attainable
By the time you established S and M, you probably have to work on the “how” aspects to reach or attain your goals. The variables are just destination points, the journey is equally important. In the process of attaining the goals, we learn to improve, grow and maximize ourselves along the way.

I like to think of it as : “What we are” vs “What we can be”. Some of us like to put an invisible ceiling over ourselves: “O I can’t do that” as oppose to “Why not give it a try and see how far I can go….”. Attainable or not, it’s pretty much up to you, how you plan and go about doing it.

Realistic
This is closely related to attainable. People tend to believe high goals are unrealistic goals, as if they are mutually exclusive. My former-CEO once posed me a challenge, design a scanner that perform most of the features of a $3kUSD product for a cost of $700SGD.

I thought he was crazy initially, but in the end I did it. It is a matter of willingness and abilities. If you are willing, you will do whatever it takes to gain the abilities or even find others who are capable to work together. For an able person who is unwilling, nothing is done. For the incapable and unwilling, nothing is attainable or realistic.

Timely
When will it be done? A goal without a time-frame is as good as no goal since it is always safer to assume that we tend to procrastinate. Once we set a timeline, we proceed to attain the goals by putting in effort, monitoring our progress and even adjusting our plans if necessary.

What other useful acronyms do you to share? Feel free to post your comments!
(please omit F**K even though it is an acronym)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Self-development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.