Have you set a New Year’s Resolution? Are you in the 10% of people which write down their goals? During a recent study of Harvard graduate students, only 3% of students wrote down their goals. Fast forward ten years, those 3% now make 10x more than the other 97% of students, combined.

With 10x your success on the line, can you risk NOT writing down your goals?

For the past 5 years, I have religiously documented the things I wanted to do each year.

• Fly a plane
• Run a marathon (In June: “ok let’s turn that in to a HALF marathon”)
• Volunteer more
• Fit into those jeans from college… (beer just tastes too good…)
• Get good at golf

Over the years, I have achieved a fair number of the goals I set out for myself. Starting with my 2014 goals, I started logically categorizing them.

Goals related to my personal life, job, and fitness level.

In 2015, the categorizations grew to include a “relationship” bucket. This was probably good as I got married in 2014. Better late than never... :)

When setting my goals for 2016, I took a step back and thought about these categories. The more I looked at them I thought:

These aren’t just goals or things I want to do. These are areas of my life where I want to succeed. These are critical success factors.

Just like any organization, marketing campaign, or project before you start you define what success looks like at the end of the effort. 

what success looks like

This year these categories are going to become the success criteria.

Seeing my goals set in the context of a broader mission, organization, or project made it feel a bit more natural to have a layer or two. 

With a framework in hand, I took a harder look at my critical success factors and asked the question

“Who do I want to be by the end of 2016?”

Without wearing my heart on my sleeve, I made some adjustments to the categories from above and set goals which aligned to these success factors.

I am hoping these critical success factors will provide me a daily barometer to govern my daily actions and activities.

Such that, if a situation comes up where I am unsure if devoting my time, efforts, emotions to a task aligns with my goals; these factors will serve as litmus test.

                You’re in, You’re in, You’re definitely out!

Question: Who do you want to be by the end of 2016? Do you set personal goals for the year? If so, how do you go about setting them? Determining if they are worth your time? What are your critical success factors?

This year I am accepting a challenging from Elizabeth Grace Saunders (no relation :) ) to “under schedule” myself in 2016 so that I prioritize achieving what I have determined success looks like for the year.

Are you up to the challenge?