Small Goals Matter Too

Having large goals and dreams are very important to pushing yourself through life.  The bigger you dream, the more you can achieve.  Setting goals outside of your current reach is a great way to expand what you are capable of.

But what steps should you set for yourself on your path to achieving your big, enormous, just in the realm of possibility dreams?  And what do you get when you accomplish these smaller tasks that, although they may seem trivial, are a vital part of arriving at your final destination?

Our solution:  Plants.

Phlearn has big dreams.  Huge in fact.  There is a lot of work to be done, and a lot of the work falls into the “I wish I was doing anything but this right now” category.  But there are some tasks that are enjoyable like redecorating the studio.  We use these enjoyable nuggets as rewards for completing the not so enjoyable tasks like refining spreadsheets or updating the coding to a webpage.

Make it Manageable

A portion of the Plant Goal Checklist

Setting small goals for yourself serves a couple different functions.  Firstly, it breaks large goals down into manageable tasks that aren’t nearly as intimidating.  It can be extremely frustrating when you keep working and working towards completing something but you can’t seem to make any progress.  Or sometimes a task seems so large that you get scared, decide you aren’t up for the challenge, and quit.  Creating smaller goals allows you to focus on accomplishable portions that can be completed within a reasonable time and with reasonable effort.  Writing a novel is a ton of work, and if you focused on the amount of work needed to complete the whole story you might get so overwhelmed that you never even start.  But if instead you focus on writing one chapter, or just writing the introduction of one character, that goal becomes achievable and the sheer enormity of the project doesn’t deter you from starting.

Give yourself a treat!

The second thing setting small goals provides is rewards.  Rewards can serve as that extra motivation needed to see a task through to completion.  Even though having plants in our studio really doesn’t make our company operate any better or worse, we really want plants!  But we’re not giving ourselves that treat until we get some other tasks done, until we hit some other benchmarks we have set for ourselves.  It may sound strange, but even though hitting these benchmarks are very important to the success of the company, we are just as motivated by the desire to get plants in the studio as we are to hit our business goals.

It’s all about feeling progress

Our big goals are going to take years to accomplish.  Years.  If we didn’t have a bunch of little victories along the way, we would get run down, depressed, lose our motivation, and quit because it just doesn’t seem worth it.  Having rewards tied to these smaller goals not only puts smiles on our faces, but also provides that little extra bump we need to make sure we meet deadlines, and keep charging towards our dreams.