What I Learned this Year by Setting (and Quitting) Goals
I started this year with a spreadsheet full of goals.
Unlike most years, where my goals are nebulous and rough, with phrases like “learn Japanese” or “build more open source tools”, these goals were concrete.
Each of my goals had a quantifiable end state and a way to keep score.
My hypothesis for this was simple: similar to how video games provide feedback for positive progress through rewards, points, and shiny, flashy graphics, I wanted to keep score and provide a positive feedback loop that constitutes my personalized definition of “winning”.
I wanted to use chunks of my free time to build 10 open source repos, write 10 medium articles, add a specific amount of Japanese spaced repetition cards, and, in order to combat my natural tendency to spend all my time on the weekends sitting inside my house, take my wife to 10 new places.
The year is now over two-thirds of the way over, and I’ve finished quite a few of my original goals.
The following is a list of things I’ve learned from the experience.
Some Goals Don’t Stay Goals
I started out the year wanting to add three thousand Japanese cards to my SRS (based on the idea that ten thousand cards are equivalent to a certain level of fluency). I started out the first couple months sticking to this goal, adding a certain amount of cards each day and tracking how close I was based on that.
After two months, I started to feel something was wrong. I realized I was spending an inordinate and uncomfortable amount of time working on this goal, and albeit I was making progress and having some fun, the goal stopped being meaningful and started to feel empty.
This specific goal took up too much of my free time and bled into the time required to accomplish my other goals. By March, I realized if I kept this up all year I wouldn’t have time to finish many of my other goals and would end up feeling like I was not spending my time being creative and living a productive life.
Since I already had about 800 cards completed, I dropped the number of cards to be created to about third of the original number and distributed the time gaine”d to a couple of different goals (total number of blog posts and machine learning-related cards).
This reassessment around the third month enabled me to better schedule points to pursue goals that improved my life more and has acted as a turning point in my year.
Some Goals Tack on Later
I realized half-way through April that my life was missing a feeling of creativity and began to seek more outlets for me to express myself in a purely creative way.
This led to attempts at drawing. The results haven’t been terrible, and I have had a lot of fun completing exercises and practicing something I have never “had a knack” for.
Drawing has crept into my goal sheet, and now I have a goal to complete 12 drawings by the end of the year. Although I might not meet this goal, I’ll at least try it and see how things turn out.
Core Goals have stayed the same
Having been fascinated with and reverent of the Open Source software (OSS) community has motivated me to make some OSS tools in the past, but I rarely actual finished many projects and hadn’t documented them in a reusable way. Because of this, I set a goal to publish 10 tools / libraries onto github and write them to a basic level of usability and functionality. I completed 8 out of 10 by July, and I feel pleased to realize I had an opportunity to complete a goal way earlier than expected.
At this rate, the number of repositories I actually will finish will probably surpass my original expectations by 60–70%!
I have always felt inspired by mass OSS contributors such as Sindresorhus and others and have learned that I can be prolific in my contributions even with a full time job.
*EDIT* As of Early October, I finished this endeavor and ended up with I think 11 or 12 repos. My interests on what to build are still changing, but it feels good to realize I was able to accomplish something I set out to do.
You Don’t have to Give Up
One of the biggest lessons I learned this year is that slow and steady progress is still progress.
When I was younger, I often felt I was moving too slow. Whether it be studying, learning to play basketball, or even learning software, I felt that I wanted to be “the best” NOW.
When there was any evidence to the contrary, I assumed that I wasn’t cut out for whatever I was trying to do and should give up and try something else.
But this year, when I quantified and incrementally accomplished small, winnable goals, I realized I can do many things I choose to do slowly and still make progress towards and accomplish large goals.
Although I haven’t met my goal of writing 10 OSS tools yet, I’ve written 8, and I have felt the good feelings of finishing, the memory of which motivates to keep pushing for more.
Healthy Life > Strict Willpower
The biggest concept that really crystallized this year is the realization that it is more important to lead a healthy lifestyle and structure your habits around your dreams than try to force yourself to complete goals when you are feeling burned out.
Although I didn’t want to at first, taking an extra day off, mixing up work on my projects with reading and playing video games, and just letting myself relax a day or two a week has enabled me to continue to finish projects while staying sane.
The most successful and productive people aren’t all productivity machines that do nothing but work. They do, however, work consistently towards their goals.
This year has marked a turning point in my life personally. Not only have I continued to grow, but since I freed myself to explore more spaces, I find I end up enjoying life more and have stronger feelings of productivity.
Your Turn
Record your goals, write down quantifiable steps you can accomplish each day to slowly inch towards towards these goals, and allow yourself to feel accomplished the next day when it becomes that much easier to do the same.
Let yourself explore other hobbies. There is something to be said for starting projects, even when you don’t finish. I guarantee that as long as you take action, you will at least learn something and enjoy yourself in the process.
Start habits that end up restructuring the finishing part of a project to become more of an experience rather than a goal.
Believe in yourself, and feel free to share any of your habit-changing experiences along the way in the comments!
