What’s important to consider when making short term and long term goals
Specific
They cannot become too general in the sense that, for example, “my goal is to be satisfied with the year 2022”. It isn’t easy to set a clear path to achieve this goal if you do not have specific subsequent goals. If you accomplish those, you will become satisfied.
A specific goal should include:
What do you want to accomplish?
Does the goal include only yourself or others?
Is the goal dependent on a location?
Do you need any resources to achieve the goal?
Measurable
You should be able to measure the goal's progress over its lifetime. It makes it easier to know how far you have come and what's left. One of my greatest motivations comes from watching my progress. For the last four or five years, most of my previous goals have been related to money or increasing the weights that I lift in the gym. Both are easily measurable, and that makes it convenient to track.
To check if the goal is highly measurable you can ask yourself:
How much. For example how much weight should I increase my benchpress with?
How many. For example, how many repetitions should I get with an x amount of weight at the benchpress?
Achievable
The short-term and long-term goals you want to set have to be realistic. Setting unrealistic goals could be demotivating or even detrimental to your mental health. If your only goal is to become an astronaut, you will probably become very disappointed when you understand the number of requirements combined with luck. The chances are slim, so you will probably become more successful if you set the goal of becoming a fighter pilot(challenging but achievable) and set a long-term goal of becoming an astronaut.
In terms of money, as many of you are interested in, setting a goal of becoming a millionaire is realistic, but becoming a billionaire, not so much. There are 56.1 million dollar millionaires around the world. Not surprisingly, the US has the most with 22 million, but Norway has 176 630 dollar millionaires. There are 4,3 million adults in Norway, so $ millionaires are 4,1% of the adult population. If you’re interested in investing, putting a significant part of your income towards investing and educating yourself, you are already part of a minority.
Relevant
The goal should be relevant and meaningful to you. Setting a goal of saving as much money as possible while you have small children might be the wrong time to go for that goal as it might negatively affect your life and the child’s life. A more relevant goal, in this case, would be to save where you can as long as it doesn’t affect the quality of your life. There is a time and place for everything, and if you have other people to consider in your life, the goals you make should be relevant to your family.
Time-bound
A goal without a time horizon is almost pointless as it makes it much easier to procrastinate. Procrastination is the death of productivity and will ensure that you won’t achieve any goals. A time-bound plan should include how long the goal lasts. Make interim goals to make sure your progress is consistent.
For example, your goal is to save 100 000 kr in one year, making it time-bound. It could also be divided into quarters where you save 25 000 kr each quarter. If your savings are in line with the first and second quarters, there should not be any problem achieving the goal. Maybe you could even raise the goal by 10-25%.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_number_of_millionaires
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/smart-goals.htm