Process Goals

by Carolyn Osborne
(Columbus, OH)

Because I have held a number of positions of responsibility, including directing a social service agency and now being a professor, I have had to learn a lot about goal setting for myself, as well as how to help my students and clients set goals.

What I have noticed about goal setting is that when I set a goal of completing something, and whatever I am completing takes longer or is more complicated than I anticipated, then I would get frustrated. That goal might be one item on a large "to do" list and I would realize how few items I would get to in a day and I would feel overwhelmed.

Completing something is a "product" goal--producing a product. I think a lot of times when we think of goal setting, we automatically assume that they have to be related to products--I will get this done, achieve that, etc. The problem with a product focus is that it encourages us to try to do a large task in a short time. I wrote a whole dissertation in about a month and a half of working 9 hours a day, 7 days a week. That is not a good way to work, mostly because all of us have large things to do but not that kind of time to devote to them.

I have begun to set process goals instead, which means I set a goal every day of working on one or more of my long term projects. One long term (fifteen week) project is that I teach an online class. So, my goal every day is to do some work on that class, usually responding to what my students have written. A product goal in relation to this would be "respond to everything I need to respond to." But this leads to making responses that are poor in quality or taking hours to make good responses and then not having time to do other things I need to do.

Instead, I look at what I need to do and choose a piece of it to do in a given day. The next day I do another piece, and I stay caught up that way (also I model to students how I want them to work on their online classwork).

Product goals, in my mind, lead to perfectionistic thinking and unrealistic expectations in terms of time. Process goals acknowledge that things take time and that large products can be completed in regular small steps. In my experience, process goals lead to healthier thinking about how to accomplish the things I want to accomplish.