Time management advice
Remember this: Before you accomplishing something, you need to something else. These things can be the most important skills or prerequisites you need to do before you can achieve your biggest dream. You can also call these tasks the "short-term goals”, as you mentioned. One more important aspect to pay attention to, is the priorities/orders or your plans/learning-paths.
You should first write down all of you goals on a sheet of paper, and then in these goals, denote them by "LG: long-term Goal"; "IG: Intermediate Goal"; and "SG: short-term Goal".
After that, pick the three long term goals that you believe that even if you can only focus on these three goals for the next three months, and for 16 hours a day, you will still feel satisfied about your progress in your career or life.
So basically my advice is that if you didn't accomplish your short-term goal, then you shouldn't have any issue, given that you follow the method I mentioned above. Because you will always have the main long-term goals as your guide. There will definitely be more than one paths you can approach to push yourself closer to your ultimate biggest goal(s).
[Note 1]
For the three long-term goals that have the most positive impact to your life, you need to use a separate sheet of paper to plan for the small steps you can feed into your monthly, weekly, and daily plans and schedules (Yes I meant AND! Because you should first plan and sort your missions by priority, then make your schedules). The intermediate and short -term goals maybe included in here to be your small missions too. Remember that execution of your daily plans relentlessly is the only one biggest challenge you will have, after you know what you really want. Then the rest will only be determined by time and some lucks…
But before you even get started on any of these planning methods, do yourself a favor to answer the following questions first (in a few clear words):
"My biggest goal in my career is ..."
"Life is ..."
"People are ..."
"Who are you, really?"
"My biggest goal in my life is ..."
"My biggest goal in my family is ... "
[Note 2]
Being efficient is not necessarily effective in your life goal, because you need to do want really matters to your life, and avoid the time-wasting tasks from the world. (高效 ≠ 有效，高效不等于有效，谨记！要首先完成最重要、最有意义的事！)
Best of luck, my friend!