Have You Accomplished Fifty Percent of Your Objectives For the Year?

I know it’s only the beginning of June, and 2014 is not half over yet. But most workplaces slow down in the summer months, when colleagues are out of the office. Then it’s Labor Day, then you have only a couple of months until the holiday season starts. Nothing much gets done in December.

So, are you half-way to completing your objectives? There isn’t much productive time left in the year.

Do you even remember what your objectives are?

Pull them out, and assess your performance. Then you’ll be ready for your mid-year review. If your boss doesn’t give you a mid-year review, give yourself one.

Come December, you’ll be glad you did. You’ll probably set yourself now on a path to get more done than if you ignore your objectives until autumn.

I recently read an article on Inc.com, “This 15-Minute Activity Will Make You More Successful At Work,” by Drake Baer, for Business Insider. Mr. Baer argues that people can be more successful if they set aside fifteen minutes at the end of the day to reflect and to recap that day’s accomplishments and failures.

People who take time for reflection each day come to understand their own performance better. Then they can better adapt their performance to achieve future successes.

But according to Mr. Baer, it requires more than simple reflection to improve performance. It requires writing down what went well each day and what didn’t. The extra step of documenting your learnings helps you to retain them and act on them in the future.

I keep a daily journal, although I don’t reflect on my performance every day. But twice a month I formally recap what I have accomplished in the last two weeks and what I need to accomplish in the next half month?

And on a quarterly basis, I pull out my original objectives and assess my performance against those detailed objectives.

I have a lot more than 50% of my objectives yet to get done this year. How about you?