Setting achievable expectations

- Do you ever find that you're over committed, that you're just trying to get too much done in too little time? The result of doing this is stress for yourself, and disappointment from other people when you don't meet the expectations that they have for you. Instead, we want to get into the habit of under promising and over delivering. If you do that, not only will you experience greater freedom, but greater success. Here are a few tips to get into that habit.

First, for any task that you have, come up with your best guess as to how long it will take, and add 10%. In other words, if I think something's going to take 10 days, then I'm going to tell people, and myself, it's going to take 11 days. That establishes a more reasonable expectation from the beginning. Number two, I'm going to use the latest question, which means when is the latest I can get this to you? If someone asks you to do something, let's say it's going to take a month, then you say I'm going to do this in a month minus five days, and you schedule time in your calendar that's reasonable for that.

You give yourself enough time, but don't put it right to the very edge. Number three is if we're working on a long project, we want to break it down into bite-sized pieces. Let's say a project is going to take one year. So, we want to ask ourselves, at the half way point, six months, where do we need to be? Then we ask the questions again. At the three month mark, where do we need to be? And then break it down one more time. At the one month mark, where do we need to be? And then schedule actions to get us to that one month mark.

That makes big projects much more manageable. And, finally, this is just a general thought. Focus on progress, not perfection. So many of us want to do things right the first time. We set these expectations for ourself that we're going to be perfect. However, that's just not the way human beings are really wired. We make progress one step at a time, and if you set your expectation for improvement, you'll be more satisfied with what you're achieving.

Setting achievable expectations is like a muscle that you need to develop. The more that you exercise it, the stronger you can become at the skill of estimating how long things will take.