Your personal strengths can be one of your greatest assets when setting and achieving goals. Speaking of goals, how can you create actionable goals, manage your time, and handle procrastination? This chapter discusses these questions and more.

Goals & Planning: How Do I Lead Myself?

Please read the following first:

• College SuccessTextbook: 2.3 (pp.70-96) (Links to an external site.)

We’ll now identify characteristics worth emulating and create meaningful goals. Throughout this lesson, I invite you to consider what specifically you would like to accomplish? And by when?

Characteristics of Successful Students

Ideal students are good at listening, are engaged, and exercise academic integrity. But is that it?

Reflect on what you value and generate a list of common characteristics or behaviors of successful students. What are these characteristics or behaviors, and which of these would you like to emulate? Take a moment now to analyze what you are doing right and what you might change.

Now read a brief summary of Ken Bain’s – What the Best College Students Do (Links to an external site.). What do you think? Which of these align with your list? What could you change?

Creating Actionable Goals

After you’ve identified what characteristics or behaviors you’d like to develop, move into the process of creating goals and come up with a plan to follow through with your goals to create deeper meaning through action.

To be truly motivating, a goal needs to have the following five (5) qualities or DAPPS:

• Dated – Motivating goals have specific[, calendared short and long-term] deadlines…. Without a deadline, you might stretch the pursuit of a goal over your whole life, never reaching it.
• Achievable – Motivating goals are challenging but realistic. It’s unrealistic to say you’ll complete a marathon (26 + miles) next week if your idea of a monster workout has been opening and closing the refrigerator. Still, if you’re going to err, err on the side of optimism. When you set goals at the outer reaches of your present ability, stretching to reach them causes you to grow. Listen to other people’s advice, but trust yourself to know what is achievable for you. Apply this guideline: “Is achieving the goal at least 50 percent believable to me?” If so, go for it.
• Personal – Motivating goals are your own. They aren’t thrust upon you by someone else…. You don’t want to be lying on your deathbed some day and realize you have lived someone else’s life. Trust that you know better than anyone else what you want.
• Positive – Motivating goals focus your energy on what you do want rather than on what you don’t want. So translate negative goals into positive goals…. [For example,] a race car driver who explained how he miraculously kept his spinning car from smashing into the retaining wall: “I kept my eye on the track, not the wall.” Focus your thoughts and actions on where you do want to go rather than on where you don’t want to go, and you, too, will stay on course.
• Specific – Motivating goals state outcomes in specific, measurable terms. It’s not enough to say, “My goal is to do better this semester” or “My goal is to work harder at my job.” How will you know if you’ve achieved these goals? What specific, measurable evidence will you have? Revised, these goals become: “I will complete every college assignment this semester to the best of my ability” and “I will volunteer for all offerings of overtime.” Being specific keeps you from fooling yourself into believing you’ve achieved a goal when, in fact, you haven’t. It also helps you make choices that create positive results.

DAPPS material is adapted from Skip Downing. 2016. On course: study skills plus edition. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Self-Management

Using your time wisely for learning and navigating through your university experience is critical for balancing competing demands for your time. Recognizing that you manage your time, as opposed to time managing you, is the first step.

Marrying goal setting with time management will produce optimal results. Setting goals ought to be deliberate, instead of reactive–meaning that we are actively pursuing our goals and achieving short-term and long-term goals along the way.

• Do you have a time management planning system?
• Some students have used a blank semester on a page planning sheet to keep track of their assignments.
• Canvas also has a calendar tool (Links to an external site.) that you might find helpful.
• Have you ever tried tracking your time for a week?

Procrastination

How do you handle setbacks? Leading ourselves by planning and following through with actually achieving goals requires resilience and stamina. The following materials highlight a few of the common issues with procrastination.

A key to understanding procrastination is knowing for yourself the distinction between two types of delay:  appropriate delay and irrational delay. An appropriate delay means purposefully putting off less significant tasks in favor of more significant tasks, while irrational delay is a self-defeating type of delay.

Here’s an example or irrational delay. I set a goal for myself that I will complete my paper by Thursday because it’s critical for my grade, but each day this week I end up spending my time not working on the paper. Maybe I do a blend of important and non-important things throughout the week, but each time I think of my paper I choose to do something else, even when the task is less significant than my paper.

Irrational delay may include apathy, low-frustration tolerance (would rather do things more immediately gratifying), low self-efficacy (feeling like you don’t know how to accomplish the task or how to accomplish it well [e.g. perfectionism]), or other characteristics.

Have you ever delayed inappropriately (or excessively) before starting or continuing an important project? If so, does this video resonate with you? 

“Procrastination” Tales Of Mere Existence (00:01:20)

For additional materials on identifying the causes of and solutions for procrastination, see Timothy Pychyl’s Procrastination group.

Motivation

Motivation is a common word that thousands of students and people in general use throughout their lives. In the context of school, so many students commonly discuss their lack of motivation to do X, Y or Z (usually related to school work) and the greater desire or motivation to do A, B or C (often unrelated to school work).

Are you motivated to accomplish and achieve success? You might think to yourself that you know all the correct answers to this question that would suggest to yourself and others that you understand motivation. Yet, why is it that, despite knowing what we know about motivation, we don’t always do what we know (i.e., there’s a gap between our values and our actions)? Is it possible that maybe our understanding of motivation is incorrect or inaccurate? We only know what we know. Is it possible you have some blind spots when it comes to motivation?

Review the PowerPoint presentation below on some historical motivational theories. As you go through the presentation, consider which motivational theories you’ve applied to motivate yourself and/or others.

SLSS 1000 Motivation Theories Historical Perspective

VIDEO 1: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

In this video, American author Daniel Pink talks about what really motivates us. As you watch, compare what you see and hear in this video with what you viewed regarding the historical motivational theories in the PPT slides on the previous page. Consider why you do or do not agree?

VIDEO 2: Unsung Hero

An important part of our metacognitive framework is to know who we are, which includes our values. How do values impact motivation? This short video, Unsung Hero, illustrates how a man’s values influenced his motivation to act.