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Career and personal life cannot do without setting goals nowadays. It is all about planning, sticking to the plan, adjusting as one makes progress and adapting, acting constantly towards one greater goal and finally achieving it. But while planning, one may discover that there are things that he or she may want to achieve in a relatively short period of time while others are planned over a longer interval. This is what makes the difference between short term goals and long term ones.

Some people will say that short term goals should be defined according to the plan you make when you first set them. If the period of time stays within one month those are definitely short term goals, but if the time extends to half a year or more, you are already looking at long term ones. What they fail to see, is that you cannot speak about short term goals without having in mind long term ones.

We can only think and plan the former against the background of the latter. For example, you could measure short term aims for yourself in days while someone else will measure their own aims of this kind in months or even in years; that is why the relativity concept in defining short term goals as done in the previous paragraph has a very important role.

One essential aspect to take into consideration when setting short term goals is that you need to be very specific and also very realistic about the planning. If you imagine that teaching your students past tense next week is a well defined and smart goal, you will probably not be able to achieve it. You need to think these types of goals in even more specific terms.

Make clear the difference between regular and irregular verbs next Tuesday morning in class between 9 and 11: this would probably sound more realistic. In this last example, the planner has set upon something that is small indeed, achievable and realistic for a two hour period. That is probably one of the short term goals that a teacher would consider a step in his or her great plan or long term goal of enabling foreign students to understand and use correctly past tense forms of verbs after teaching, reinforcing, practicing and testing for at least several weeks of an English course.

Hoping that this has made clear the difference between short term goals and long term ones, the only thing left is to advise you to stick to the plans you have made and demonstrate perseverance in order to achieve success.