Goals are not committments

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

What goals are:

• Want to’s (not “have to’s”)
• Meant to inspire
• Long-running (i.e. designed to lead to further goals and growth)
• Allowed to change as you learn

What committments are:

• Have to’s (not “want to’s”)
• Meant to satisfy others
• Tactical and short-lived
• Unchangeable — they are set in stone

But, they both have dates.

And since they have dates, it’s easy to confuse the two.

Have a new, ambitious, nebulous, project at work, spanning months or years? Don’t be fooled into slapping a date on the end and calling it a commitment. There’s too much ambiguity to commit to an outcome.

That date is a goal — and that goal will change as the project progresses. That date is designed to change as it is merely a baseline, made with myriad assumptions, and minimal initial information.

If you treat it as a commitment instead, you will continue to make intentionally bad decisions to meet arbitrary dates just to keep higher-ups happy. This will kill your team and product in the long-run.