{"id":318,"date":"2012-03-08T16:24:01","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T00:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/?p=318"},"modified":"2012-03-08T16:24:01","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T00:24:01","slug":"smart-goals-and-alaskan-librarians-build-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2012\/03\/smart-goals-and-alaskan-librarians-build-communities\/","title":{"rendered":"SMART Goals and Alaskan Librarians Build Communities"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>You’ve heard that goals need to be “SMART,” right? It’s a fairly common model<\/a> for making goals, you know, not pointless. And I have, over the past few years, improved at making goals “Specific,” “Measurable,” “Relevant,” and “Time-bound.” The first two, especially, I do well—I think it’s the engineering training that makes those so easy.<\/p>\n

But, every once in a while, I realize that I have totally skipped the “A,” which stands for “Achievable.” One of my major weaknesses is perfectionism (and it is<\/em> a weakness, more often than it’s a strength, especially within the intersection of libraries and web development), which is part of the problem. Also, although I have a little bit of project management training, I sometimes fail to think through the risks inherent to any given project. In the particular example I’m writing about, today, now that I am sitting down and acknowledging them, I believe the major risks are overcommitment\/burnout (for me), others’ lack of time or interest (too small\/busy a committee), insufficient groundwork having been laid, and a myriad of existing and potential technical hurdles. <\/p>\n

I’m not here to declare failure on this project, but to acknowledge, to myself and to the world, that my vision of the project was unreasonable. I need to dial it down a bit, aim for something that can be achieved in a reasonable timeframe and that can be grown into the eventual vision I have for this project, or something equally good. I thought that a small group of committed volunteers and I would bring this whole thing from [essentially] zero to DONE in a matter of several months, and that’s just not realistic. One, my group of volunteers may be very<\/em> small, indeed; only two people have expressed interest, and that was with reservations. There might be one or two others who would help, if I asked individually. So, not many. Two, “DONE”? Really?<\/p>\n

Here’s the thing, though: we can totally get some good work done. We CAN get a blog going, to feature existing librarian volunteers; we can maybe survey our membership to see what volunteering people are already doing and share that data; and—admittedly, this is not as cool as an ongoing volunteer clearinghouse that our communities all know about and that is self-sustaining with minimal committee intervention, but it is more achievable: we can set up a Librarian Volunteer Day in the state. That will be a lot of work, true; it’s probably an aggressive goal, but it is an achievable<\/em> goal. <\/p>\n

I find my blood pressure is going down, a little, just having acknowledged all of this and dialed my goals back into some semblance of reasonableness. \/sigh\/<\/p>\n

(Blogs: for making mistakes and learning in public<\/em>, right?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’ve heard that goals need to be “SMART,” right? It’s a fairly common model for making goals, you know, not pointless. And I have, over the past few years, improved at making goals “Specific,” “Measurable,” “Relevant,” and “Time-bound.” The first two, especially, I do well—I think it’s the engineering training…<\/p>\n

Continue readingSMART Goals and Alaskan Librarians Build Communities<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,5,43,60,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-el12ala","category-alaska","category-leadership","category-librarians-build-communities","category-librarianship","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}