Goals, measuring, and the Unknown
Be itt life or business, people say you’d better set goals. Then review regularly how far you are from your goals, and if you’re keeping the right directions. The more precisely you can measure your progress, the better. One way to do it is by having mile-stones or subgoals.
But what to do when you have no idea where you’re heading. Well, you have some vague thoughts, call them a vision if you like. How do you measure your trip to the unknown? How do you measure your progress towards discovering the North Pole? You can’t even be sure if you found it, unless you bump into a sign that says, “sorry, folks, already discovered”.
This is my case with the TaskBerry project. I’m feeling a great progress one day, then I’m feeling stuck the other day. R.D. Laing used to ask, “what do you do when you don’t know what to do?” My question could be, “how do you know how close you are when you don’t know where you are?”
I found a way to answer this question. Just make up something. Here is how I’m doing it with TaskBerry. I set a not-very-distant goal and call it the Vantage Point. I couldn’t specify what it is or how it looks like, it’s only a name yet. My hunch is that the project has progressed about 20%, so 80% more to get there. We can review it every now and then, and see if there’s a progress. And as the name suggests, I hope we’ll see more once we got there. We can even say what our goal actually was.
2009/04/09 18:34 
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