For an EPICQ goal to be truly useful it needs to be broken down into smaller chunks.
Once you’ve written down all the aspects of your EPICQ goal, the next step is to imagine what you want to achieve as part of a mission or quest, to continue with the game/gamification connection. Any good quest or mission has multiple steps to it before the hero of the story can complete the final challenge.
Now, remember that when you break down your goal into smaller parts, each part still needs to be achievable and challenging (hopefully). The reason for this is those small accomplishments and even small setbacks still offer you an opportunity for feedback, either from co-workers, teammates or even in the form of self-reflection. Because when you succeed it’s an epic win and when you fail, it’s an epic fail! Regardless, either outcome is a chance to learn something and to improve upon the process.
The best way to break down an EPICQ goal is very similar to how the OKR (Objectives & Key Results) method works. In this case, we’re using terminology taken from gaming and gamification to reframe our minds towards epicness. And therefore we will disassemble our EPICQ goal into a variety of targets, milestones and rewards, or TMRs.
As was stated with the explicit and practical statements of your goal, you can break it down into a more granular form, a step-by-step explanation of how the goal will be achieved. These individual steps are the targets that you need to hit to achieve your goal. How do you hit these targets? You do this by stating the various milestones you need to get to, these are the series points in your main quest or the side quests that lead to achieving the reward for the main quest. And the rewards are the outcome of achieving the milestones and targets. And these rewards can be something very tangible such as having finished a landing page for your website to get a marketing campaign going, or something a little more abstract such as rewarding yourself for having put in so many hours to achieve the target you set for yourself, like having your favourite meal for having put in 5 days of exercise.
TMRs are features of the goal that you can measure, their overall function will help with the calculable and quantifiable aspects of your goal. And should you not achieve the targets and reap the rewards, in other words, fail, then use that to see why you couldn’t. Where can you improve? Regardless of the success or failure, always check-in and reflect. The feedback aspect is what will help you to determine the importance of your EPICQ goal.