Short-term view can be beneficial. It could help us to keep going.
I have been blogging for over a year now and it is easy to lose sight of my purpose of why I started. I began writing in the office and sent it out through company emails. It was a weekly thing. The purpose is to spread out to my team some guidance on how to think so they can better handle the work. It expanded to include some of my colleagues from other departments who got to know what I was writing as some of my team started sharing.
Now that I am blogging through my website and sharing it through social media, I am able to reach more people. I wanted to share my thoughts, experiences, and learnings with anyone who might need it.
And this is where I lost sight of my goal and began focusing on what I can gain.
What is short term view
The meaning of the short-term view varies across different practices, industry, and thinking. It is important to note that unlike long term view, short term view focuses on the immediate or shorter time. The key here is to remember that the first one looks at things way further in the future while the latter is almost here like today, a week or a month. Here are some of examples to illustrate what it means:
In money. A short-term view when it comes to money is when you are thinking of what to buy from your paycheck by the next payout. Or saving for something like a vacation or celebration that will happen in a month or two. Long term will be focusing on saving for retirement which because we are young, will take 20-40 years from now.
At work. Working on a project may be considered either short-term or long-term depending on the length of time it will require to complete. However, the tasks necessary to complete the project are considered to be for the short term since most of it can be done in a day, a week or a month. This would mean that each short term tasks adds up to the completion of a long term project that may take years to complete.
In life. Working out and eating healthy food daily are considered short-term. The fact that you aim to do it consistently daily can be accomplished in a day. The effect of it would be a better-looking physique, healthy mind and body, and living longer compared to others who are not even exercising.
Looking at these examples, the short-term view focuses on immediate outcomes rather than long-term goals. The results that happen almost in real-time from each action taken are what is important in the short-term view. This then mean it is an instant gratification. If that gratification is not met, then we lose the desire to move forward, therefore, delaying further our long-term goals or worse, not even meeting them. And if we put our short-term view in check, we could get some lasting effect.
Benefits of short term view
We have all been told to see everything from a long-term perspective. We should all be aiming for something that will benefit us in the long run and not the immediate future. The concept of delaying gratification stemmed from this principle. However, it is very easy to lose sight of our goals when it is nowhere even near what we could see. Our motivation vanishes and eventually, we stop pursuing what we set out to do.
This is where the short-term perspective would help us. It could provide us with the necessary pull to keep moving forward as we could see immediate results and often rewards from our efforts.
The following shows examples of long term goals with short term views to illustrates better how the short-term view provides us the benefits and enables us to stay on the path to our destination.
Being healthy. One friend of ours joined a training program to get healthy. She said that the deeper the why, the stronger the motivation to keep pushing on. Her why is to see her children grow up and be part of their lives. She wanted to live long enough to see that happen. That would take decades to accomplish. So what could probably help her not lose her way? The immediate result of her training. Once you train, in a couple of days or weeks, you’ll feel better, you will look good in clothes, and you get admiration. I know that those benefits are extrinsic in value however, we can not deny that we all strive for that. And that could keep her going.
Climbing up the corporate ladder. It is very rare to get promoted within a year. It would at least take two years and some up to ten years. That is a long-term goal. The benefits of getting a higher position are monetary and the ability to make the necessary changes you could have been longing for in your company. To keep going, the results of your performance reviews, the feedback, the appreciation, and the rewards, may help you to keep moving forward. Striving for these would enable you to have the energy to continue to pursue that title.
Getting rich. For this, it is going to be about money. Not rich with friends or a rich relationship. Just about money. If you are like me who is an employee and has an earned income, getting rich would take a very long time. Decades. Considering all the available things for us to buy and apps that make purchasing easy, it is very easy to not be rich. We only live once, right? So, why not enjoy it? Which is the very reason why we need a short-term view. If you start saving money even on a monthly basis, you will see that month-on-month, that bank account starts to grow. Aiming to see it grow every month is a short-term view and will keep you going as you can immediately see the result of your hard work.
Making it work
There is a danger with the short-term view. When I started blogging, my long-term goal was to reach more people who may be helped with my thoughts. However, when I started thinking of monetizing it, I was emotionally hurt and was thinking of stopping. The views were very low. Some days, I only get 1 view, and there was one time that no one viewed my post. I was spending money to keep this site up just to share my thoughts.
So I decided to reach out to other bloggers and learned from them that it took them two to three years to have a decent viewership. They also provided me with the necessary tools, tips and tricks on how to reach more people and increase my viewership.
This made me keep going. The immediate return of my efforts was to see the number of people visiting and reading my blogs start to climb. I knew it would not be much but the number of at least one person reading it helped me to keep moving forward.
So, in summary, while the long-term view provides us with a deeper meaning for what we do, the short-term view helps us to continue as the benefits and rewards are immediate which gratifies us. We could therefore use it to our advantage and achieve what we have all been looking for.
Leave a Reply