24 May THE TASK TUNNEL – 7 STEPS TO GETTING THINGS DONE

Goals and milestones periodically show you how far you have come in achieving the vision for your chosen business area. Goal-setting is difficult and comes with an inherent tendency for one to avoid it, ignore it, or procrastinate in doing it. However, it must become an essential and regular activity and business people simply have to learn to master the process of setting and achieving goals. To ensure lasting business success, there is now way around it.

Goal-setting has many popular formulas, but there is one which I have specifically developed to be very practical and easily applicable. So in applying this, it is important to first see the micro-component of goals which are the smaller, more manageable tasks. My philosophy is that if the tasks can be successfully tackled consistently, then it is very likely that the larger goals will also be achieved. So in this regard, the Junglepreneur Task Tunnel has been created as a seven-step goal-achievement process developed with the focus on tasks as the route to accomplishing goals. It has been simplified here thus:

IDENTIFY:

Start with identifying all the known tasks necessary to accomplish the overall goals and vision, and then write them down in a format or location you can easily access.

QUANTIFY:

These tasks are the activities relating to your goals, so quantify the tasks in terms of the resources that will be required. The quantification should be in a form you can relate.

COST:

Next consider the physical effort and financial cost of carrying out the tasks to see if it is within reason. If not then you may want to reconsider the tasks.

RANK:

Next rank all the tasks in order of importance and prepare your Task Tunnel. Your Task Tunnel is your action or to-do pipeline for passing a certain number of your tasks through and getting them completed.

CHOOSE:

Choose five or six of the most important tasks, have a simple plan to do them, and put them into the starting point of your Task Tunnel.

DO:

Take the first step exactly where you are, start doing your first set of five tasks, and get them moving along nicely.

NEXT:

Once the first set of five tasks are underway, choose the next set of five tasks. Start doing them alongside the first five, but spread all the work over a reasonable period of time.

At any time you should have about ten tasks going in your Task Tunnel, but you will realize some of the first set of tasks are soon to be completed. Once your first set of tasks has been completed and the second is well underway, start a third set of tasks at the beginning of your Task Tunnel. At any point, you may decide to reduce the total number of tasks in your pipeline to a number you can manage. The principle is to simply have a continuous process of tasks being put through your Task Tunnel until you have completed all the tasks necessary to achieve the goals and thereby achieve the vision. These tasks are important to your goals, so go over them daily for evaluation and also to report and document challenges or progress.