What are your goals for college and beyond?

“Vision without action is merely a dream.
Action without vision just passes the time.
Vision with action can change the world.” -Joel A. Barker

College is the next step in the journey towards your future. Imagine taking a journey without knowing your destination. When you decide to take a trip, you typically decide on your destination first and then look for maps and resources to help you get there.

Before we focus on strategies to help you become successful in college, let’s focus on your goals for your future. Your goals will fuel your motivation when you are tired and don’t want to read another paragraph, work another statistics problem, or write another essay.

Take a minute to reflect on and imagine what you want from college and what you want after college. That will help you identify your goals. Think generally about the type of work you want to do, the type of life you want to live, and the type of person you want to be.

You may want to continue to refine your goals until you clearly see what you want. Visualize it. The idea and the vision you imagine will inspire you. When you get it right, you’ll feel it. If your vision doesn’t motivate you, it may not be big enough. If your goals aren’t big enough, you may need to set some Big Hairy Audacious Goals (from Jim Collin’s book Built to Last). Push yourself to be bolder in envisioning what you want to achieve in college and beyond. (Even if you don’t settle on your goal statement now, continue thinking about it. We’ll discuss your goals throughout the course and revisit it in future assignments.)

“Vision will ignite the fire of passion that fuels our commitment
to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to achieve excellence.
Only vision allows us to transform dreams of greatness
into the reality of achievement through human action.
Vision has no boundaries and knows no limits.
Our vision is what we become in life. ”
–Tony Dungy, former NFL coach

Imagine that vision for your future as being at the top of a set of stairs. To get to the top, you need to start with the steps in front of you: your college degree, this semester, this week, and today.

Goal Setting

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Antoine de Saint

A goal expresses a result you want to accomplish that will require your own efforts and your wise use of the opportunities to learn and of a network of supportive others. Each day you make choices that move you closer to or farther away from your destination. Remind yourself that even small steps towards your goal are better than no progress at all. The fact that you’re in college now shows you already have achieved the goal of graduating from high school and that you’ve made a major commitment to completing a college degree.

To achieve a big (hairy audacious) goal, such as earning your college degree, you’ll need to break down what must be done into subgoals and apply time management strategies to help you achieve each of the subgoals. In this chapter, you will assess how well you set goals and manage your time. You will learn and practice strategies for setting goals, managing your time, and building habits so that you can achieve your goals.

As you think about your academic goals, keep in mind that your life includes more than college. You’re a person with individual needs and desires, hopes and dreams, as well as plans and schemes. Your long-term goals likely include graduation and a career but don’t forget the importance of developing and maintaining relationships, including friendships and family relationships. During college, you may work and likely also want to continue to spend time doing things that you enjoy, such as working out, hobbies, gaming, movies, music, or reading. While you are a student you may not be actively pursuing all your goals with the same fervor, but they remain goals and are still important to your life.

Warhawk Wisdom:

Achieving goals involves autonomy or taking responsibility for your own actions, honesty when things aren’t going well, curiosity about finding ways to reach your goals, and perseverance in the face of challenges.

Smart Goals

Smart goals are tools that will guide you as you break down big goals into “doable” smaller, clear subgoals. SMART goals have the following characteristics:

• Specific: Don’t write “I will become a great musician”; instead, write, “I will finish my music degree and be employed in a symphony orchestra.” Then break that goal down further so that you can take steps towards it today, such “I will practice my violin for at least thirty minutes a day.” Adding specific language to goals makes it easier to determine the steps necessary to achieving goals, as well as helping you hone in on what the end result will look like.
• Measurable: Setting a goal of “I want to graduate with a high GPA” is certainly a start, but what does “high” mean? Just barely having a GPA high enough to graduate (which is a 2.0 here at AUM)? Earning Latin honors (Cum Laude 3.4-3.59; Magna Cum Laude 3.6-3.79; Summa Cum Laude 3.8-4.0.) at graduation? Measuring progress towards a goal is much easier when you are specific.
• Achievable: While it is important to set goals that will challenge you to work harder and truly apply yourself, there is a fine line between pushing and challenging yourself and setting a goal that is simply unachievable. Goals related to managing your time are great examples of this. In one week, you only have 168 total hours to divide up among your various responsibilities. If you want to take 15 credit hours each semester, work a full-time job of at least 40 hours, get 8 hours of sleep each night, and take at least one day off to rest and relax, you will quickly run out of time. As hard as we try or wish, we cannot create more time. An achievable goal is one that takes realities into account and balances those with your desire to push yourself. Smaller, achievable steps towards your goal are better than no progress at all.
• Relevant: We are willing to work harder to reach goals that we really care about, and we are likely to give up when we encounter obstacles if we don’t feel strongly about a goal. If you’re doing something only because someone else wants you to, then it’s not your personal goal – and you may need to reconsider if that is truly the right goal for you.
• Time Bound: You won’t feel very motivated if your goal is “to finish college someday.” If you are realistic and specific in your goals, you should also be able to project a time frame for reaching your goal.

Thinking about your goals in this way helps you realize how even little things you do every day will pay off by moving you toward your most important long-term goals.

Warhawk Wisdom

Spending the right amount of time on the right tasks will require you to develop perseverance. Sometimes you’ll have to focus on assignments or readings when you’d rather do other things.

Planners and To-Do Lists

Calendar planners and to-do lists are effective tools for time management. You’ll find a variety of choices, including paper and digital versions.  Some people think they don’t need to actually write down their schedule and daily to-do lists. If you kept due dates in your head in high school, why write it down in a planner now?

Some AUM students were talking about this in a study group, and one bragged that she had never had to write things down in her calendar because she never forgot dates. Another student reminded her how she’d forgotten a pre-registration date and missed taking a course she really wanted because the class was full by the time she went online to register. “Well,” she said, “except for that time, I never forget anything!” Of course, none of us ever forgets anything—until we do.

At each transition, such as the one from high school to college, you need to assess what you do and how well it works. Perhaps a planner, to-do list, or a combination of the two can help you manage college more effectively and achieve your goals.

One way to think about managing your time is to think of it as a puzzle. You have all of the pieces, but you have to examine them and find where each piece fits. To be successful in college, you need to fit your goals and obligations into the time you have available.

Use a planner to write in important dates and deadlines for school. But it’s just as important to use the planner to schedule your own time, not just deadlines. If you know you have a test coming up in a class, schedule extra study time for that class throughout the weeks leading up to the exam. You don’t need to fill every time slot, or to schedule every single thing that you do each day, but the more carefully and consistently you use your planner, the more successfully you will manage your time. Don’t forget to include other obligations in your life. You’ll want to find study time early if  you have a major test on the Monday following the weekend of a family wedding.

A planner cannot contain every single thing that may occur in a day. We’d go crazy if we tried to schedule every telephone call, every email, every bill to pay, every trip to the grocery store. For these items, we may use a to-do list, which may be kept on a separate page in the planner or app on your phone.

Look at the example of a student’s planner below to see how they organized their time for one week:

At the beginning of each semester, make an appointment with yourself to review the syllabus for each of your courses and write important dates in your planner. Add major events (for example, the wedding of a family member, concert tickets, sporting events) in your personal life. Consider using a system of different colors for different classes or bright highlighting for major deadlines.

Make an appointment with yourself at the end of each week to look ahead at the next week’s deadlines and commitments. Reflect on how well you managed your time management in the previous week. Look ahead to see if the next week holds tests, quizzes, or deadlines for assignments. Make sure you’ve included your work schedules and family commitments. Then plan your study time and some time for relaxation and taking care of yourself.

Here are some more tips for successful planning:

• Block out study time after class meetings to review and clarify your notes. Schedule another block of time (or two) before the next class meeting to do reading and review your notes.
• Be realistic. If your class runs to four o’clock and it takes you twenty minutes to wrap things up and reach your study location, you won’t have a full hour of study between four o’clock and your five o’clock class.
• Don’t overdo it. Few people can study four or five hours nonstop, and scheduling extended time periods like that may just set you up for failure. Your effectiveness will decrease over an extended time period. Take breaks or switch subjects during longer study sessions.
• Leave holes in your schedule for free time. Use those open times to take care of yourself and recharge your energies.
• Schedule healthy habits. Try to schedule some time for exercise at least three days a week. Schedule time for healthy meals and enough sleep too. Taking care of yourself means you’ll be more productive when you are studying.
• Use your time between classes wisely. If you have a free hour between classes twice a week, how could you use the time best? Maybe you need to eat, walk across campus, or run an errand, but you could still have forty minutes free twice a week. Instead of “killing” that time scrolling through social media, use it to review your notes or to read a short assignment. Over a semester, two periods of forty minutes a week adds up to 20 hours of potential study time.
• Allow time for adjustments. If an assignment is taking longer than you had scheduled, look ahead and adjust your weekly planner to prevent the stress of feeling behind.
• Find what works. If you’re missing some important deadlines in your planner, how can you highlight the most important things?
• Stick to the plan. When following your schedule, pay attention to starting and stopping times. If you planned to start your test review at four o’clock after an hour of reading for a different class, don’t let the reading run long and take time away from studying for the test.

Habits

We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Will Durant

We already have more habits than we realize, some good and some bad. For example, think about what you do after you wake up. For many of us, that time between waking and coming to AUM’s campus includes making coffee, making breakfast, exercising, reading or watching news, feeding a pet, checking social media, showering, dressing, and gathering what we need for the day. Do you use a planner or a to-do list to ensure you do all of the tasks you need to do before coming to AUM? Most likely, this series of tasks has become a series of habits for you.

Habits can be tools that help you achieve your goals by automating things you want to get done. For example, most of us brush our teeth without having to have it listed on a to-do list or scheduled inteo our calendars. You can engineer habits that will work for you. The following video is a good overview of the basics on habits, but you’ll find that you can go a lot deeper in understanding how to engineer your habits.

The Science of Habits, Marco Badwal (15:53)

How to Build Habits

• Identify the cues that trigger your habits. Cues that signal for you to begin studying may vary. For some of us, it might be after class or when we return home or to our dorm after class.
• Set up your environment for success. Set up a place to study where everything you need is close at hand.
• Reduce friction. Setting up your environment for studying also reduces friction. Another example is to work out early in the morning when fewer things compete for your attention.
• Remind yourself of the rewards. Your habits result in rewards. For example, the fresh feeling in your mouth after brushing your teeth is a reward. Identify and focus on rewards for habits you’d like to learn. Remind yourself that starting on a paper early relieves stress and makes you feel more confident.
• Stack your habits. Consider the process of getting ready to come to class. You may have stacked habits already. You may change clothes, review your appearance, pack snacks or coffee, and make sure you have your computer, books, and assignments. You don’t typically stop between those steps to consider what else needs to be done. What other habits can you link to habits you already have?

What to do when things go wrong. . .

• Things happen. If you miss a day, just make sure you don’t miss two. Be aware that when your schedule changes, you’ll have to make sure your habits don’t.
• Be aware of your willpower. Your daily willpower runs low when you’re tired or have made a number of decisions, so automate tasks you need to do by building habits. This also means that getting enough sleep and eating a healthy diet makes your willpower stronger. The more you repeat a habit, the less willpower they will take.

Continue Your Learning

You can learn much more about how to use your habits to your advantage. Start with any of these resources on habits:

• The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
• Atomic Habits, James Clear
• Judson Brewer: A simple way to break a bad habit | TED Talk
• Forget big change, start with a tiny habit: BJ Fogg at TEDxFremont

Journal:

1. Who am I?
   1. What are your strengths in setting and achieving goals?
   2. What are areas you would like to improve in setting and achieving goals?
   3. When have you successfully set and achieved goals?
2. Who do I want to be?
   1. How would you like to manage your time?
   2. What goals would you like to achieve?
3. Who am I becoming? What SMART goals will move you towards success this week and eventually towards achievement of your goals for college?