At the beginning of the year, everyone is creating goals both personal and professional; however, the trick is maintaining your goals so that you are successful. Although it is important to create SMART goals to really be successful, you should also create tasks.
So what is the difference?
A Goal is defined as: The object of a person's ambition or effort; an aim or desired result.
A Task is defined as: A piece of work to be done or undertaken.
An example of a SMART goal could be: "To increase sales by $10,000.00 by the end of the 1st quarter". There are many tasks that you would take to accomplish this goal, such as contact more potential sales leads or create some type of incentive or sell more product to existing customers. The tasks should be used to help you achieve the goal.
Using this example, it is easy to see how these tasks will help you achieve your goals. Sometimes tasks are important enough that they can become SMART goals themselves; for example, to contact more sales leads you may have a goal of "Contact 15 new contacts per day;" then, this goal would have tasks such as research potential leads, or something as simple as scheduling enough time in the day to make the contacts.
The key to successful SMART goals is to have tasks. Tasks are the support system to ensuring SMART goals are accomplished.
By using the LifePulse tool from eLife HCM, you can create and track goals and tasks that will make you successful in today's challenging workforce.