How I Meter/Set/Achieve Goals

Just in time for New Years, a friend posed a deceptively simple question to me: “How do you set and keep track of goals?” While answering it I gained some great insights into my own process. Here they are:

Stop NOT working on your goals.

Goals are by definition something we want to work toward. As such, I would assert that your largest obstacle is the multitude of non-goal progressing distractions. Here is a much abbreviated list:

1. Facebook/Messenger
2. Email/Slack/Text/Hangouts/Twitter/Instagram
3. Netflix/Hulu/YouTube/Medium
4. Ads/TV/Engineered Distractions
5. Stuff curation

Most of these are “tools” designed to turn your human attention into money for someone else. I am not saying that you should eliminate them, or avoid their use in pursuit of your goals, but for the most part their design is orthogonal to achieving your goals. Attention spent inside of these engineered distractions is time your goals have lost.

The first step in better managing your digital attention, is knowing where it is spent. Check out RescueTime. Install it, let it run for a week, review afterward, be horrified. The other tool I use is a brazenly stolen from a meditative technique called noting. This practice boils down to acknowledging instances of inattention/distraction without self-judgement.

Knowing where you attention lies is the first step to choosing a different way in the future.

I want to call out media platforms specifically from the above list. Plenty of media out there that improves the human experience, provides cultural richness, and generally keeps us informed. Sadly, services which provide media focus on their own monetary enrichment as opposed to your personal enrichment. To combat this, I maintain a list of “Media to Consume” and I don’t come to one of these services without already knowing what I want to see. When you actively filter for content you move your goals forward as opposed to the agenda of the provider.

There is another adversary that competes for your time and attention, it is an activity I refer to as “Stuff Curation.” Every object in your life incurs a time-cost which for the most part are trivially small, but ensemble will sum to huge fractions of ones day. My strong dislike for this time black-hole is why I am a minimalist. Most people I know spend something like 20–30% of their life in this activity. For a great read on this subject, and how to combat it, check out, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” The TL;DR is: If an object doesn't move your goals forward, you should exorcise it from your life. Sell it, give it away, be free of its needs.

Build support structures for your goals and use them.

Break up time into dedicated blocks for goal oriented progress and respect the boundaries you create— For physical tasks this is obvious. It takes time to arrange tools, setup the project, go to the gym, etc. This time is measurable and there are penalties to switching between activities. Breaking time into suitably sized blocks makes progress possible. For creative work it is doubly important. This talk by John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) about how to be creative contains a fantastic science backed discussion of this all. A goal that you do not allocate time to is not actually a goal.

Break up space into dedicated blocks for goal oriented progress and respect the boundaries you create — Creating physical space for goals is productive both symbolically and materially. Whether this is a spot on your desk, or a bay in a warehouse, attaching a physicality keys you to the goal at hand and helps create mental distance between it and potential distractions.

Engineer feedback loops to generate motivation — Creating intrinsic and extrinsic feedback mechanisms is key. Whether we set a goal internal to only ourselves or undertake a project that is externally judged, gauging progress and making adjustments is what gets us there. In the case of your workplace, there might be automatic institutional feedback loops that get applied. View these loops as a starting point from which more optimal approaches can created by thought and willful effort. Willingness and ability to interact and change these loops to fit your goals will get you there faster.

When goals are framed in less structured environments we have an even greater power to stack the deck for our success or failure. Fundamentally, we either fabricate feedback loops for ourselves and listen to them, or let the goal die. Here are a few good patterns I have seen:

1. Commit to a achieving a couple of sub-goals each week, and decide on a time to check in on progress. Measurable incremental progress is in itself rewarding
2. Create a small (additional) rewards for yourself on completing concrete sub-goals. Make sure to exercise the reward when you achieve them!
3. Ask a collaborator/friend for external check-in and volunteer to do the same for their goals. Don’t let them off the hook and pick people who will symmetrically call you out.

While many people build these loops intuitively, spending a few extra minutes thinking about them, and how they fit into the goal itself will set future-you way ahead in getting there.

Question your process. Constantly. — There are no universally correct answers in this space. Anyone who has an exact prescription for success is selling you something. Recognize that most employers have process in place for people who don’t create their own. Independent of your goal, a single approach will not be generally optimal as it evolves. I know a great number of prolific people whose unifying trait is awareness of their process and willingness change it in pursuit of their goals, not vice versa.

Become moderately hostile to things that threaten the above. —This is one of the hardest, but also most important steps. There are times that the goals of another person or institution will clash with your own. Recognize external pressures, scrutinize them, and understand if they are in opposition or support of your growth and achievement. Know also that the roles of these pressures might change. The work that initially presents you huge growth potential, a year later might be a means a paycheck and stability that supports different goals. Be in touch with the role of external pressures, and be willing to push against them. If you don’t have boundaries around your goals, then someone else is setting them.

In closing, here is a rough sketch of my process:

1. I maintain a list of things I am actively working on in a paper notebook.
2. I allocate metered time to them individually. Usually somewhat informally, but I always have specific sub-goals in mind.
3. I maintain physical space designated for many particular projects.
4. I treat the above time and space as I would an agreement with a good friend that I am loath to cancel on.
5. When I work on projects, I don’t look at my phone, facebook, etc.
6. I check how my metering of time and space aligned. Usually this is at the same time I plan the next weeks sub-goals.
7. I consider each project’s importance to me and its priority week-to-week, month-to-month, and year-to-year. The multiple scales allow true planning of life arc. I find paper notes hugely helpful with this.
8. I acknowledge when a project moves down the list faster than I complete it. I explicitly abandon projects I lose interest in. This is hard, but it makes space for better ones!
9. Whenever possible, I enlist my friends and community to help me. Sometimes this means telling people when I plan to be done with a thing, asking them to keep me honest to that timeline. Other times I vest them in the success of shared endeavors. When a project is “ours” we motivate, succeed, and fail together.
10. I celebrate successes, mightyously. On the other side I try to own more than my share of the failures. Both sides are incredibly important.

Now get out there!

(Also please recommend and share! It moves my goals forward!)