Posted by What is the difference between goals and tasks? What activities should you do before you set up your business through the CEIDG portal or form a company? How do you link these tasks to goals? And finally: what is the point of all this before setting up a company – can’t you just set up a company and start running it?
I often answer these and similar questions in meetings with young entrepreneurs or people who want to run their own business. I myself also used to think, when I started my first company, that after all, the moment to register a business and the moment to start working on my own business are the same time. Over the years, however, I have come more and more to the conclusion that it is necessary to prepare for the opening of the company, but not yet open the company. That moment must come when a minimum of things have been done, prepared, created, so as not to do it during the – usually turbulent and hectic – development of the company from zero to about a year or two after establishment.
Let’s first establish what the difference is between goals and tasks. I wrote about goals a few weeks ago in two posts.
Goals differ from tasks in that a goal is a state in the future and a task is a way t this goal. It is unchanging at a given point in time, it has some parameters, but there is no change, dynamics or movement in it. It is like a photograph of your life in the future. Goals are good to express with only two verbs: to have and to be. For example: our company has 12 products on offer. On the other hand, we do not say: Our company sells 12 products. The second sentence is an action, not a state, and it fits to specify tasks.
Tasks, therefore, are some action taken and can be expressed with a verb other than to have and to be. For example, to prepare a company’s offer, to design a website, to recruit employees, to renovate a store premises, etc. You probably feel the difference between to be sure and to make sure, to be renovated and to renovate, to be constructed and to construct. This is the difference that is at stake.
Each task has 3 simple parameters, answering 3 questions. First, what is to be done (pair: verb and noun). Second, who is to do it (person or subject). Third, when it is to be done or how long it is to take (deadline or performance interval). Linguistically, it is sometimes difficult to meet these requirements in one sentence, but you can cope by adding some values in parentheses. For the sake of example, here are some correctly worded tasks at the stage of preparing a company for opening:
- Create a channel on YT, containing 30 shorts (daily) about the products sold within 30 days (Tom).
- Design a company logo within 5 days (graphic designer).
- Stock the warehouse with 20 products, one of each type (10 days, Anna).
- Establish relationships with 4 potential customers of the company (until 30/06/2023, Anna).
- Select an accounting firm to handle the company’s accounting until 30.06.2023 (me).
It now remains to arrange the tasks in the schedule of tasks in the preparation stage of the company. Read about how to do this in the next blog post.