Friday, June 03, 2005

Goal: Embrace goals

Today at work I learned about my company's review process, which consists of putting together a set of goals for me over the next 6 months to a year and then breaking those goals into acheivable sub-goals that can be completed to support those bigger, longer term goals.I realize that's a pretty elementary concept, but I am having a hard time getting my simple brain around the idea of essentially making a roadmap (career or otherwise) that would....and this is the wacky part....actually get carried out.

It seems for all of my compulsive list making and goal setting, I'm very bad at breaking down my enormous, generic goals into smaller, manageable pieces. Every year I make a gigantic list of things I want to accomplish, but very few of those items ever get done because there's never a plan or a timeframe for executing them. Instead I just flip through my lists throughout the year wondering why things never get done, and in the end I just feel guilty about all I didn't get accomplished. I'm an extremely ambitious person, with very high standards for what I want to get accomplished, but totally inept at putting the wheels in motion to get things actually started.

You can see how this simple , half hour conversation about the review process has spiraled into a larger life-organizing idea-fest for me. It's going to be a tough weekend of thinking about an action plan that I'm supposed to put to paper next week.

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