Matt Ragland shows how to hit big goals faster by getting your team aligned and using ClickUp to track them. He separates goals from targets (the measurable milestones), and explains why leading-measure targets like generating 50 warm leads matter more than waiting for final results. Connect daily tasks directly to targets so everyone sees how their work moves the needle.
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Personal productivity is fantastic. One of the things that excites me the most is seeing how far and how high can I push myself in my productivity, in the goals that I want to achieve. But one of the things that will help you and everyone go further is to work on a common goal together. Because there's a saying that I really like, that is, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. You can do so much more as a part of a team, assuming that— and this is a big assumption— direction, you can work together effectively on the goals and targets that you're setting. I've seen that personally over the past 6 or 7 months as I've been leading a team for the first time in years. We're working together on different projects and goals, and we are way more effective when we are moving in the same direction at the same pace together. Now, there's another key distinction here that if everyone's going in different directions, then it can cause a lot of strife, it can cause a lot of confusion, you actually go slower because you're all going in different directions. And so it's really, really important, critical in fact, to make sure you're all going in the same direction and all have the same goals in mind. Now personally, I love writing down my tasks each day. I love the physical nature of it. I love the single-tasking aspect of just writing something down and not getting distracted by seeing all the tasks and all the goals and all the projects and all the targets that other people might have in the digital tool of choice. So you know that I love, if you don't know, I love writing things down on paper for me personally for the day. However, when it comes to collaborating and moving in the same direction and achieving big goals as a team, nothing beats a digital tool. Now for my creative agency, it's called The Whatever Co. We use a tool called ClickUp. You've already seen me talk about ClickUp in some recent videos. Make sure you check those out if you want to learn more about how to get started. But in this video, I'm going to show you how we use ClickUp goals and targets and tasks to make sure that we are effectively and efficiently working on the same goals at the same time, at the same pace so that we can achieve great success. Now, a key distinction is to know the difference between a goal and a target. A goal is the end result of what you want to achieve. One of the examples that I'm going to give you is that we have a goal of signing 12 new clients in Q3. Now, targets— I'll also call them milestones. If you've been following the channel for a little bit and you know about my QMWD framework, there's a link to view that video in the description below. The milestones are those targets, but in ClickUp they're called targets. That lets you know if I am achieving this target, then I am naturally on the way to a successful achievement of my goal. So that's very important to know because you'll see this in ClickUp. You'll see the goal, which is the top-level big picture thing that you want to achieve, and that the targets are those milestones. You can also think of them as stepping stones to a natural successful achievement of the goal. For example, if we have a team goal of signing 12 new clients in Q3, those targets could be things like looking for 50 warm leads or booking 25 prospecting calls with people that we think could be good clients. It also includes things like improving and optimizing the onboarding process so that we can go from signing the client to actually delivering work for them much faster. Here's another example of a goal. We want to hire 6 new contractors by the end of October. And so targets are things like reaching out to my network, that network that we have with the existing employees, It could also be things like writing job descriptions as a target. Another thing would be conducting interviews and improving the onboarding process for new hires. So the top-level goal is to increase our team size, to hire 6 new contractors. But the targets are things like the job descriptions, like the interviews, like the onboarding process, like the training documentation. And one of the things that I love about how ClickUp organizes their goals is that it makes it really easy to track your progress. So every time we check off a target or we say that we've gone from 1 new client to 2 new clients, up to 3 new clients, it will give you a percentage to completion of the goal that you have. When you see that percentage start to rise, you know that you're getting closer and closer to the achievement of your goal. And that's why it's also important to create targets that are more about leading measures rather than lagging results. Now I'll tell you what I mean by that is if I'm looking for a leading measure target, that would be something like finding 50 warm leads. Those are things that I can go out and do regardless of the number of clients that actually end up signing. Same thing with trying to book, say, 25 prospective client calls. I know that based on my percentages and based on my results in the past that the leading measure, the leading target of booking that number of calls will often lead to a lagging, in a good way, lagging result of booking those 12 new clients. One other important thing that I want to point out in ClickUp that took me a little bit of time to figure out is when you click on these targets, you can add tasks to the target itself. So what you would want to do is maybe in a list that you have for the number of clients that you're working on, or the number of calls that you've booked for the week, or the number of leads that you've generated for the month, you can add that task to the target, and that way they will be connected. So you can see, like, in order to complete this target or reach this target, I just need to go through these tasks and make sure that I have time protected to do the work that I know will lead to a positive outcome and a successful achievement of our goal. So this is a really simple way to get started with ClickUp goals. And if you have followed my channel at all, if you look back through my videos in the past, you'll know that I advocate very strongly for starting simply with any kind of new tool or software habit, or like even something like bullet journaling, anything that even seems simple, start it simpler than you think you have to. If you want to get a little more comfortable in ClickUp first, I suggest you check out my videos on project sprints and just the 15-minute project setup. Start making lists for everything that your company is doing, and that will help you see based on results and based on actions of work that you've done in the past, what your goals look like, what kind of targets you want to be setting, and what tasks will help you achieve those targets so that you can naturally have a successful achievement of that goal that you're setting. Finally, thank you to ClickUp for sponsoring this video and being a sponsor of my channel. I really appreciate you supporting my work and making it available for all of you as well. I really enjoy using ClickUp to work with my team and collaborate on tasks and achieve our goals together. It is very clean, very easy to use, but to make it even easier to use and in, you know, my own way, I'm going to be starting a new channel with ClickUp that is dedicated to helping you learn, optimize, and grow your company using ClickUp. The first videos will go up in early August, but if you want to go ahead and subscribe to the channel, ring the bell and do all those things so you know exactly when those first videos are coming out, click to subscribe in the description below. There's no videos up as of this recording. Well, there might be one if I can get it it out in time, but go subscribe to that channel. ClickUp, Matt Ragland together, going to be creating a lot of great ClickUp videos for you. I know you're going to enjoy them. Thank you for watching this video on my channel. I hope to see you next time. Make sure you check out my video that I recently did reviewing the Building a Second Brain book as well. There might even still be a giveaway of a book available. So make sure you check that out and watch my videos going forward. Thanks again. And I'll see you soon. Bye.
