The worst use of your time is not to be inefficient, but to become excellent at something irrelevant. How do you know you invest your precious time working on meaningful goals? With every goal, you only need to ask yourself six questions:
- Clarity: What’s the issue exactly?
- Impact: Why is this issue significant?
- Ownership: What’s the solution?
- Practicality: How is the solution attainable?
- Validity: How is the solution effective?
- Sustainability: How are the advantages of the solution bigger than the disadvantages?
Every question is equally important. For example, if your goal is not significant, you probably don’t think big enough. On the other hand, if you can’t take full ownership of the solution to achieve the goal, it’s probably a pipe-dream. In both cases you’re wasting your time.
This handy checklist will help you to quickly determine if you’re working on the right goals. It’s also useful to check the quality of the strategic goals of your organization. If you ask these six questions with every strategic goal and you find any gaps, it’s important to either fix the deficiencies, or choose different goals. After all, the second-worst use of your time is to work for an organization which wants to become excellent at something irrelevant….
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