Goal Setting and Prioritization

Setting goals that measure the outcome you want and actually steer what you do.

A goal is only useful if it can change a decision. That sounds obvious and rules out most of what gets written down at work: goals that measure activity instead of results, goals nobody looks at between January and December, goals that never become anything you'd do on a Tuesday. A good one names the outcome you want, has a way of telling whether you got there that you can't quietly reinterpret, and gets reviewed often enough to steer. This is a longer horizon than day-to-day prioritization — that's a separate problem of ordering and slack — but the two connect at exactly one point: a goal that never wins against the urgent work isn't a goal, it's a preference.

Scenarios

Your goal for the quarter is "publish 20 blog posts" and you're on track. What would you do — keep going, or check whether the twenty posts are producing whatever you wanted them for, and change the measure if not?

It's October and you haven't looked at your goals since they were set. What would you do — quietly rewrite them to match what you actually did, or read them as written and note honestly which ones you missed and why?

You want to move into management "at some point." What would you do — keep it as an intention and watch for opportunities, or name the two concrete things you'd need to have done by June and put them in a week?

Takeaway

Measure the outcome, not the effort. If you can hit the goal without anything changing, it's measuring the wrong thing.
Write down how you'll know, specifically, before the period starts.
Review on a cadence you actually keep. A goal reviewed twice a year steers nothing.
Turn each goal into a next action with a slot in a week. An unscheduled intention stays an intention.
Let yourself miss. A perfect record means the targets moved, and you've learned nothing about your own estimates.