Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog

Today’s post is by Al at 7P Productions.

When I was an undergrad engineering student, I recall being overwhelmed with the amount of work I had. I was having difficulties with managing my goals, so I created a simple acronym to help me. I still use this acronym to this day and it’s called A-C-E, which stands for Assess, Commit, and Execute.

Recently I came across SMART (Specific, Measureable, Achieveable, Realistic, and Time-bound) as well as EASIER (Envision, Assess, Strategize, Implement, Evaluate, and Report). I agree with the steps for these two approaches, but I know I won’t remember what the acronyms mean. I’ll stick with my own ACE - only three words to remember!

For me, the beauty of ACE is that it works for big or small goals. If you’re at a restaurant and going through the menu, the assess-commit-execute steps might take only a second. If you are going to begin a new three-year, multi-million dollar project at work, you will still go through the assess-commit-execute steps, but there will be much more iterations, and each iteration will be more involved.

The key for me is that I already had components of SMART and EASIER in my ACE system, plus more. The continuation of this series will go into more details of each of the steps in ACE, and I’ll also compare each of the three systems.