Objectives vs Goals

At this time of year you'll hear words bandied around like objectives, goals, priorities and tasks. 🎯

These are actually all connected, but what do they actually mean and how do they feed into each other?

👉Firstly, we look at our objectives they are an outcome that we want to create or a future state that we want to make a reality. They are often higher level or bigger picture thinking. They tend to be a little bit broader but they are still focused on an area.

👉Goals feed directly into our objectives. They are a more detailed outline of what needs to be achieved to make that objective a reality. Often there is going to be more than one goal aligned to an objective and these can also help create milestones that mark our progress, so that we can see how we are performing.

👉Our priorities are driven from our goals. It's where we will put our focus, time and energy. When we work with priorities, our planning becomes more effective and is generally easier to create meaning that our results tend to be stronger. Rather than working on random things in our business, we are prioritising the key things that are going to directly allow us to complete our goals and achieve our objectives. Priorities are created by balancing factors such as the time sensitivity or urgency, the level of importance or its impact back into us, our clients or our business and the relevance that it has to any other goals or tasks that we're working with.

👉Tasks are the detailed actions that we're going to take, it's easy to think of them as the step-by-step instructions that we schedule into our working plan and manage through to completion. Tasks can be broken down into much smaller chunks and therefore much easier to work with. They are not just about the things that we physically are going to do, they can also include activities like research, thinking and making decisions. These are all valid tasks.