What are personal objectives in business?

When you own a business, you’ll likely be very focused on making sure your business grows and improves over time. While this is vital, it’s also important that you develop personally as well. Without a good deal of self-improvement, you might struggle to solve any problems you and your business face in the future.

This article will outline what a personal objective in business is, and provide you with a few examples of objectives you can try yourself. The topics we’ll cover include:

• What are personal objectives in business?
• Why are personal objectives in business important?
• What are examples of personal objectives in business?
• How can I use Countingup to achieve my personal objectives?

A personal objective is an achievable target you set yourself with the eventual goal of personal development. You can create personal objectives for every aspect of your life. You could have a personal objective that helps you improve your productivity, social skills, or knowledge on a particular topic. 

Although you might see people use the terms interchangeably, there is a difference between goals and objectives. Goals are the outcome you want to achieve, and objectives are the milestones you pass on the way to achieving your goal. 

Objectives are very specific, while goals are more general. For example, if your personal goal is to become a marketing expert, a personal objective related to this goal might be signing up for an online marketing course.

Since the key feature of personal objectives is that they are achievable, they tend to also have a time limit attached to them. To use another marketing example: your objective would not just be to complete a workbook on marketing; it would be to complete that workbook within the next month. 

Personal objectives are a vital part of personal development. It would be difficult to measure how much you’re actually developing and improving your skills without setting objectives.

A business has statistics it can rely on to measure its success, but you don’t have a personal number that will increase when you’re getting better at public speaking or managing your schedule. Personal objectives are the human version of these statistics. 

Personal objects are important for measuring your progress towards achieving a personal goal, but they can also be an essential part of thinking up goals in the first place. If you set yourself the objective of organising your workspace, it might inspire you to create the new long-term goal of acquiring a new property to run your business out of.  

Improving your time management is always a good idea, as it will positively impact your entire business career as well as your personal life. If you’re trying to think of personal objectives that will improve your timekeeping, think of how you spend your time at the moment.

For instance, if you spend too much time on your phone, set a personal objective to only spend a couple of hours on it per day for a week. On the other hand, if you feel you spend too much time working and have a poor work/life balance, set an objective to stop work at six o’clock every day for the next month.

Make sure any timekeeping objectives you set don’t interfere massively with the running of your business, though. For example, if you have a new client that contacts you frequently, it might be a bad idea to set a personal objective to spend less time sending texts and emails.

Organisation objectives are most achievable if they start small and build up. You could begin with an objective to organise your desk, then move on to organising your paperwork, then try organising your whole home office.

Organisation objectives can be more abstract than tidying up your workspace, but these tend to overlap with other types of objectives. You might want to organise your workload, which means looking at your time management and scheduling. Or you could be trying to organise your finances, which might lead to you setting a few educational objectives so you can learn more about accounting.

Educational objectives are a great way to learn skills if you’re trying to teach yourself. Suppose you’re using an online course or attending an institution to learn more about a topic. In that case, you’ll likely have some objectives laid out for you already, like completing a homework assignment or passing an exam. 

If you’re teaching yourself, though, you’ll need to think up your own objectives. It’s a good idea to model these after the sorts of objectives a formal course would have. 

For instance, you might set yourself the goal of watching two videos about the topic you’re studying each night. Another objective might be writing a thousand words at the end of each week to show yourself what you’ve learnt so far.

It may be that one of your personal objectives revolves around improving your financial management skills. There are many ways to approach this objective, but a good starting point is to use financial management software. 

This type of software can help you learn more about your finances, and has handy features that make accounting easy. A great example of financial management software is Countingup. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.