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36 Examples of Personal Goals

John Spacey, November 02, 2018

Personal goals are targets for the improvement of an individual. These may be developed from different perspectives such as your improvement as a professional, student or person. The following are illustrative examples of personal goals.

Productivity

Get more sleep to improve focus and concentration during the day to get more done.

Time Management

Work without any distractions in periods of at least an hour of length.

Communication

Improve my pitches to clients using storytelling and visual communication techniques to increase my win-rate to 60%.

Networking

Attend at least 3 investment banking conferences to connect with old and new faces in the industry to grow and maintain my professional network.

Decision Making

Read at least 5 architecture and 5 medicine related books this summer to build a knowledge of these professional areas before deciding on university applications in the fall.

Practice

Improve my calculus scores by getting a tutor and doing a large number of increasingly difficult practice problems.

Training

Complete information security training to improve my knowledge of core security concepts.

Professional Skills

Learn how to apply reference class forecasting to improve the quality of project estimates.

Language

Drill Italian vocabulary on my morning and evening commute to improve my listening and reading comprehension scores.

Technical Skills

Self-learn basic linux administration by installing linux at home and configuring it to maximize my productivity.

Responsibilities

Manage a few small projects to gain project management skills and experience.

Management

Communicate more effectively to set expectations for performance with team members. Where expectations aren't met communicate this clearly in a constructive way.

Visibility

Prepare for meetings to develop useful contributions. Speak up more in meetings to pitch ideas and support the ideas of others.

Work Quality

Improve the quality of my deliverables by carefully reviewing and editing each document before sending it out.

Customer Service

Deliver superior customer experience by being sympathetic to customers who are emotional or perhaps even angry to be a calming force that solves their problems and makes them feel better.

Leadership

Take the initiative to solve process problems by coordinating improvements across departments.

Public Speaking

Give at least 3 presentations this quarter and record these sessions. Review these recordings and participant feedback to improve with each successive talk.

Knowledge of Results

Engage local trucking companies to ask them to switch to environmentally friendly technologies and practices. Regularly follow up and track the results achieved.

Knowledge of Performance

Ask my instructors and peers to critique my performances from video.

Problem Solving

Work to discover and resolve the root cause of customer problems as opposed to addressing the symptoms or suggesting only temporary fixes.

Diligence

Follow up with customers a week after their purchase to see if they have any questions or concerns.

Change

Push brave ideas for change to lead in my profession as opposed to blindly following the crowd.

Reputation

Show restraint, civility and good taste when posting in social media to avoid damaging my reputation.

Personal Resilience

Learn to care less about what people are thinking and saying. Instead focus on my performance and behavior and let opinions form as they will.

Financial

Invest more conservatively and less actively to stop losing money to fees and emotional trades.

Self Direction

Push for assignments at work that will help me to develop. Push against high risk, repetitive and pointless action items that are a waste of my efforts.

Self-Awareness

Spend quiet time alone at least once a week. Avoid obsessing over problems and opportunities during this time and let my thoughts flow in new directions.

Attention to Detail

Begin tracking where my monthly spending goes to identify waste.

Creativity

Stop developing assumptions and constraints too early to allow for more farfetched ideas to surface and be validated.

Experiments

Experiment with asymmetric designs to try to achieve visual balance without symmetry.

Family & Friendship

Be more humble amongst friends and family and try to build up others before myself.

Physical Fitness

Do something physical such as going to the gym or talking a walk every day.

Health

Lose weight by eating slightly smaller portions and avoiding junk food altogether.

Culture

Participate in a festival this summer to be more engaged in the local culture.

Community

Join a sailing club this Spring to meet more people outside work and gain broader links to the community.

Quality of Life

Move closer to work to reduce my commuting time.

Notes

Actionable goals are changes that you can implement now or soon. End-goals are desired results. Generally speaking, end-goals such as "get into a good university" are easy to identify and seldom change. As such, goal planning is mostly focused on actionable goals such as "study without distraction in one hour periods" that represent meaningful steps towards end-goals.

Overview: Personal Goals
Type	Personal Development
Definition	Targets for the improvement of an individual.
Related Concepts	Personal Development » Productivity » Time Management » Communication » Storytelling » Visual Communication »