What are you trying to achieve through your use of time, effort, money and management skills? Where are you going, how are you going to get there, and when will you arrive at your intended destination? The answers to these questions and the nature of your intentions for the future can be found in your choice of goals. Since management is a goal-directed activity and an activity directed toward goal attainment, your goals provide direction to all your management efforts. Goal conflicts are identified and dealt with through priority settings. Then high priority farming/ranching and family life goals and information about enterprises and activities of your farm/ranch are drawn together in a management plan. In managing our time and in our discussion of goals this pyramid and the sequential order that it has been put together pretty well sums up the process.

This depicts the four main steps that lead from identifying our highest values to accomplishing our daily activities. What must be kept in the forefront of our thinking is the governing values portion. If we set goals that are not aligned with our value system, even though a great deal may be accomplished, it will not be satisfying because of the things that will be neglected.

If however, a daily task list is created that does not reflect long-range and intermediate goals, we may find ourselves being BUSY but not as PRODUCTIVE as we truly can be. Remember Jim?! There must be consistency throughout the pyramid, AND it must be built from the bottom up. That is why most people are frustrated and stressed out a good deal of the time. They ignore the first three levels. They make up a “to do” list, but they have not based it on anything but urgency. The squeaky wheels always get the grease. Consequently at the end of the day, even if they have crossed everything off their list, they have largely ignored those silent, undemanding tasks that never make it onto the list because they are never urgent.

After all the governing values have been set, and you have set one or more goals that will help you do something about those values, and you are keeping focused on those goals, is that enough? Definitely so — it is called DETERMINATION.

Remember this:

THERE IS NO CHANCE, NO DESTINY, NO FATE,
THAT CAN CIRCUMVENT OR HINDER OR CONTROL
THE FIRM RESOLVE OF A DETERMINED SOUL.
–Ella Wheeler Wilcox