Strategic Thinking · Lesson 1 of 3

Goals, actions and resources

If your plan requires resources you do not have, it is not a plan you have made yet.

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A goal is a state you want to reach. An action is something you do. Confusing them produces busy years: "learn design" is a goal, "do a course" is an action, and doing the action is not evidence of reaching the goal.

Between them sits the question of resources — time, money, attention, relationships, credibility. Strategy is the allocation of a limited set of these, and if nothing is scarce, no strategy is required.

Constraints shape more than they limit. The same goal pursued with ten hours a week and with forty is not the same goal, and pretending otherwise is the most common reason plans quietly fail.

See it happen

"This year I will build the side project, get fit, and read more."

The read that arrives on its own

Three good goals. Print them and put them on the wall.

The same situation, with this idea

What does each one cost per week? Roughly eight hours, four hours, three hours. I have about nine spare. This is not three goals — it is one goal and two things I will feel bad about in March.

What changed

A plan that needs resources you do not have is not a plan yet. Costing it in hours turned an aspiration into a choice that has to be made.

The takeaway

If your plan requires resources you do not have, it is not a plan you have made yet.

Easy to take the wrong way

Costing only the obvious resource. Attention, decision-making and goodwill run out faster than hours do, and nobody budgets them.

Try this

For a goal you hold, write what it costs per week in hours, and whether you have them.