Goals are not something that you have to sustain yourself.  They aren’t like food, water, shelter, or other life necessities.  What can make goals tough is knowing when you need to set a goal.

Here are some questions you might ask yourself should you think about setting a goal:

1. Do I have any personal improvements I need to make?
2. Do I often let day-to-day events overtake the improvements I want to make in myself?
3. Do I work better when I give myself a specific task to accomplish?

If you answered “yes” to these questions, you probably would benefit from making a goal.  Goals can be very useful motivators.  They can also be useful in establishing some discipline on the improvement you need.

However, be careful that you don’t set so many goals that any one goal gets ignored.  You can probably only deal with 3-5 goals at any one given time.  Thus the goals that you set should be ones that are very important to you.

You might have one long term goal and 2-4 short term goals.  The micro goals really don’t count and you can have a number of these since they are for very specific situations that will be quickly achieved.

One final note:  if you don’t have at least one goal, you probably aren’t going to make the improvement you need.