Efficiently Establishing Goals and Priorities
In establishing your goals and priorities for any project as well as for your life much can be learned from the type of flow charts and processes used in real estate development and construction management. In development projects goals are clearly established and each task that must be completed in achieving that goal is given a priority.
Let’s say that you are a real estate developer and have a site that would be suitable for a new hotel or a high rise condominium tower. Before starting construction you must first establish a clear and focused goal. Do you build a hotel or go for the condominiums? If you opp for a hotel what type of hotel should it be? Luxury, budget, business? These are simple questions to ask but should involve a good deal of research, a feasibility analysis, and a survey of resources available to the developer before a final decision is made as to the right answer.
As a financial matter the final decision should be based on a ROI analysis and the type of project decided upon should be the one that produces the best long term return. In the real world other factors may come into play. For instance the developer may have dreamed of owning a prestige hotel for years. He has already decided that he will develop a hotel, no matter what the research indicates is the optimal project for a particular tract of land.
When starting a new task or project people often began with the easy stuff, those items that can be taken care of quickly and that give a sense of accomplishment once completed. The items that will be more difficult to accomplish are often held back to last. It’s like people think that accomplishing the easy stuff is a good warm up for the more difficult tasks that lay ahead.
In land development you must often start with the most difficult items. For example, to build the hotel you must have proper zoning and approval from various government agencies. Without the zoning and permits the project can not proceed. The zoning and approval process can be quite political in nature, take a lot of time to accomplish, and in some cases expose the developer to a number of unsavory decisions in order to get all of the necessary approvals and permits. It can be a very difficult and expensive process.
So zoning is a critical task that must be accomplished early on in the project. No matter have many other tasks you complete before the zoning they all become meaningless without zoning approval. Of course, obtaining financing for the project is critical as well. But without the zoning you can not obtain the financing so you must start with the zoning.
The construction process is more straightforward. Most items must be completed in exact sequence. For example, you must complete your foundation before you can start erecting steel columns.
For the swift completion of a project it is important to identify and to schedule concurrent items. That is items that can be undertaken at the same time. You must also identify critical items. Those that no matter what their difficulty must be given priority and completed before other tasks can follow. Of course, today computer software makes all of this process much faster and easier.
How does all of this relate to you and your path in life?
To get to where you are going you must first know where you want to go. To be really good, perhaps great, you must set meaningful goals early in life. Of course, there are exceptions. A few people manage to make a number of career changes and are successful in them all. However, the odds are against you if you make too many changes in direction. You lose too much precious time, a non renewable resource.
In certain professions getting an early start is essential. If you want to be a world class pianist or violinist the earlier you start your lessons the better. If you want to become an exceptional doctor of medicine you have many years of study and hard work in front of you before you will reach your goal. The sooner you start with the right educational course work the more likely you are to reach your goal.
You will have a huge advantage in life if you have an excellent mentor or parents who push you along a meaningful focused path early in life. It’s not that you can’t achieve whatever goal you set for yourself and achieve it on your own but your task will be many times more difficult than for those who receive proper early guidance. I will soon write a series of articles about the importance of this.
There is no point in taking easy courses in high school and college when you will have to take on difficult subjects before you can possibly reach your goal. Once your clear goal is set it’s wise to dig into the difficult course work right away to see if you have what it takes to succeed in your chosen field. Why waste time “warming up”?
Once you have established your goal in life, just as in a construction project, you need to determine what steps you must take to achieve your goal and when you must take them. To be efficient in this process you need to discover which steps can be undertaken concurrently.
For example, if you want to be a civil engineer you may want to work on construction projects in the Summer to gain early practical on the job experience while attending a class or two at night school. Or perhaps you decide to really buckle down and work hard by taking an extra course or two every quarter or semester.
I will follow up with more articles on setting goals and priorities, and on time management.
For now the main point I want to make it that it is important to take on deal breakers early in any decision making process. For example, if you want to be an engineer you can waste a lot of time and energy completing easy required courses on your way to achieving your goal only to find later on all of your effort and time wasted because you can not deal with calculus.
If you want to be an engineer this will be a deal buster no matter how good of a draftsman you may be.
Many folks, businesses, and governments put deal busters at the end of the process in working to achieve goals. This is an inefficient way to operate. Stay tuned for an expansion of this topic and process into the political arena and for articles on how important receiving proper guidance early in life can be.
