JDI! (Just do it!)

“Every page answers a question“, a student explained as he proudly me his PowerPoint presentation. We tweaked a few structural errors here and there, and corrected some forgotten capitalizations.

“Wow!”, I thought, “intentional”. The whole content was intentional.
I suddenly heard the voice of an editor I once I had.

“What’s the intention? There has to be a pedagogical intention. Why are the students doing this activity?”, she would ask, and rightly so! Back to the drawing board. Invariably, I had to redesign the activity and rewrite it too.

But what a valuable lesson, and a timely reminder: intention. You need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing for your work – or life, for that matter! –  to be meaningful and effective.

 State your intentions

Here are five verbs you can use to express intention. They are always followed with the infinitive form of the verb (to + verb).

Want              Joe wants to open up a new branch in the coming year.

Need              We need to order new parts for the customer.

Intend           HR intends to hire twenty interns this summer.

Plan                The technician plans to leave for Italy on Friday.

Aim                 I aim to help you express intentions in English with this post.

Setting goals to map out the work flow serve as rungs on the ladder of productivity.

Be smart about it

Whether you’re a teacher, student, customer service rep, accounting clerk or project manager, your intentions need to be clear every step of the way for the results to be satisfying. Setting goals to map out the work flow serve as rungs on the ladder of productivity. The best goals are SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.

Action is the 3D printer of achievement; intentions and goals are the raw materials required to feed that printer.

Here’s the deal

As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Figuring out intentions and setting goal are great, but without any action, they’re pretty useless. Action is the 3D printer of achievement; intentions and goals are the raw materials required to feed that printer.  So, JDI (just do it!)  

What are your intentions for today?

[Photo: Shutterstock/FabrikaSimf]