How I set goals in practice

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This article provides a practical framework for achieving goals. It details in a straightforward way, the steps you need to take to succeed when setting goals, it covers:

❤ what goals are
❤ how to write them down
❤ how to prioritise
❤ how stay on track

Following this process and keeping your goals under review as described below will do wonders for your productivity because it aligns the what with the how and why.

#1 What is a goal?

You already have goals, and they drive your behaviour

It’s no surprise that goals are described in the majority, if not all, self-help literature as the single most important thing you need to succeed. But do you understand what a goal is? Who set your goals (you do have them as I’ll show), why and when?

Outside of sport, the dictionary definitions for goal include

❤ The object of a person’s ambition or effort
❤ An aim or desired result
❤ The destination of a journey
❤ Point marking the end of a race

For the purposes of this article, let me define the essence of what I consider a goal to be

“something that you don’t currently have
that you need carry out a set of steps to achieve”
in the future”

Breaking that down, we see that a goal consists of 3 major components:

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❤ Desire

A goal is a desire, it’s a thing, a feeling, a state of being, it’s a something, something that you want to happen or indeed don’t want to happen

❤ Process

A goal is the end result of a set of steps. For example, I had a goal to write an article on goals, in order to do so I had to research, write, read, rewrite, think, etc. That was the process of getting this article written.

❤ Plan

A goal is a goal when there is a plan in place to achieve the goal. Without the plan, it’s not a goal, it’s at worst a pipe-dream and at best a meandering journey to the sloppiest implementation.

Remember, you already have goals…

First thing to get in your head is that goals aren’t some strange additional thing that you need to add to your mindset, they are already in place, let me reiterate — You already have goals, whether you mindfully chose them or not, goals are the things that motivate your behaviour. If you’re overweight (assuming no medical cause and that have a problem with being overweight) then you had a goal to become overweight or it was a side effect of another goal (to live hedonistically and damn the consequences) the unwanted weight is the outcome of your goal driven behaviour, regardless. Same goes for anything unwanted in your life that’s within your control, you literally have that because you wanted to have it.

Mindfully chosen goal driven behaviour is the secret to productivity, it’s not actually a hard concept. Effort without direction, might be wasted, direction without planning might be wasted, effort with direction and planning is goal driven behaviour.

Before we go further into setting goals, let’s look a little at the kinds of goals that you have.

Intrinsic Goals

These goals are those that bolster your long lasting sense of purpose and wellbeing, examples are satisfaction from personal growth and building resilience, staying in shape, mastery of skills, having meaningful relationships, completing meaningful work. Note that they’re not necessarily good, a prime example being a smoker having the intrinsic goal of feeding a nicotine habit (more on this later).

Extrinsic Goals

These goals are those that give fleeting satisfaction, but can leave you hungry for more, such as sense of achievement from Hedonism, fame, money, image. Note that they’re not necessarily bad, but don’t provide deep seated satisfaction, an example being becoming a Doctor because your parents pushed you to do so, but don’t feel that it’s your life calling.

Self Determination Theory

A psychological theory which suggests that 3 things are required for good psychological functioning, the first 2 in particular being the most useful when thinking about goals (the 3rd could form part of you goals!)
Autonomy — level of control you have over goal setting and completing steps
Competence — your mastery over tasks and skills
Relatedness — feeling of belonging or attachment

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#2 Writing Down Goals

So, you already have goals, goals to drink, eat, sleep, work, pay bills, look after the kids, wash, walk the dog, decorate the house, work on your big project, take out the bins, write articles, tidy the loft, keep the garden tidy, remember to buy birthday gifts, plan holidays, get healthy, shop, watch tv, listen to the radio, read for fun, read the news, get organised, shop, take photographs, shoot videos, update social media, whew!

That was a deliberate run on list, I’m sure you can write your own, but that’s the stuff flying round my head at this moment in time. Dig into that list, there are two items that I want to focus on

❤ Write Articles
❤ Work on Big Project

Firstly an admission, I’m a procastinator. No point in being indirect, especially with myself. I’m blessed with an ADHD brain which can do pretty smart stuff when the stars align, but unfortunately the reminder feature simply didn’t ship and the focus and attention capabilities were not feature complete.

In order to shore up my natural tendency for my brain to have no framework, I’ve read more self-help literature than most could be bothered with and there is still a mountain of material unread with more and more released every day.

One key theme that comes out of the majority of my reading and thinking and ultimately my limited successes is that writing down goals is the key to achieving them. This comes in from classics such as “Think and grow rich” through the venerable “Getting things done” and everywhere in between.

I’ve read about making lists, I’ve personally used every list making tool and approach on the market and I’m even writing my own. I’ve tried kanban, with physical and virtual boards, bullet journaling, mindmaps, trello and variants, one note, todo.txt, you name it. Here’s a couple of examples of how my lists have progressed over time.

Making lists is not new to me, keeping up with the discipline is the difficult bit

In practice, I have a major problem with this advice though due to the way my brain is wired, I have a terrible issue with “Out of sight, out of mind” — so once I put a thing on a list, it’s somehow become external to me. Yes it’s “in the process” but somehow, once I’ve got it on that list, somewhere in my head it counts as a completion of the action. The “trick” here is goal based lists. By their very definition, goals are things that have not been achieved, keeping goals as the front and centre of your lists keeps the focus on what you want to achieve.

Grant Naylor nailed it with Rimmer’s Study Habits. His list becomes the obsession, the action, it’s own reward and he never gets anything done. Take 4 and a half minutes to listen and enjoy and then reflect on how your writing down of your tasks might be doing more harm than good.

Rimmer’s Study Habits

A better way

OK, Rimmer is hilariously extreme, but there is a message here about spending more time on the process than on the results. What we really need is get these goals written down (and they need to be written down) in a way that does the following things

1. Excites you (or if you really need to focus on something that doesn’t, find a way to enthuse yourself, as Principal Skinner said in the Simpsons, make a game out of it)
2. Reflect your values (if you have learned to articulate what they are yet, if not, skip forwards to #5 – working out your values)
3. Are very specific, so you can measure progress, avoid vagueness, it’s a motivation sapper, being specific sets you up for success, this is the plan part.
4. Visualise (imagine) the goal actually being achieved, detail is what helps this process, use your imagination, let your brain go
5. Create a set of time-bound milestones (next 5 minutes, hour, day, week, month, year, 5 years — depends on what it is) — don’t worry about “how” for anything beyond the immediate next steps
6. Write them down — this is the plan part, work out the true milestones
7. Reward the milestones, even just the intention to act is worth a reward (might be as simple as grabbing a burger or something, but recognise that you earned it)

Putting it all together

In order to begin writing in a mindful goal based way, this is now a point where you need to choose whether to use paper or electronic. I’ve found after having tried everything that electronic is best for me, it’s convenient, mostly always available and suits my working style. I’ve tried all the tools and until I write my own (it’s been a decade… time to focus!!) I’ve settled for Microsoft Todo. It’s not perfect, but it’s suitable for my needs. You go ahead and choose the tool that works for you, you can implement the next steps in whichever way you see fit.

Within To Do, I’ve created a list simply called goals, within that list I create tasks and within those tasks, I explore the goal using the technique laid out above. Initially my goals were very vague and didn’t fill me with the urge to implement them, I named them things like Get Wealthy, Get Healthy, Be Productive and such like, good goals, but missing all of the key ingredients required to make these effective goals. So let’s take one goal of mine, it’s my long term plan, and then write it down using the techniques described above.

My overarching Goal: Retire in the sun, open a beach restaurant on a tropical island, be happy

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OK, it might sound daft, but that’s because it’s my goal, my dream, not yours, it’s the way I envision my best future, what I don’t have is a plan to make that happen and that’s OK, focusing too much on how I can’t achieve that goal is a sure way to prevent it ever being a possibility. At the moment though, it’s a pipe dream, no steps in place to ever make it possible, so let’s review that goal in a way that makes action happen to lead to achievement.

1. Excitement — I love tropical islands, I’d like to learn a foreign language, I love cooking, I can’t imagine a future where I sit doing nothing, this idea definitely excites me
2. Values — I have a strong work ethic, so the idea of a working retirement, being of service to others in some way meets my values. I have a belief that anything is possible. I have a spirit of adventure and the idea of a tropical beach ignites that. I am eternally optimistic, I can and will make this happen.
3. Specific – OK, now we’re into the meat, the difference between a pipe dream and a goal is the specifics, note that I don’t at this stage need more than a vague idea, that’s the planning stage, but I need to drill into specifics to flesh out the pipe dream. Let’s break it down. I want to retire, but at what age? I want to go to the sun, a tropical island, but which one? Is it safe, stable, what about healthcare which I might need when I’m older? How will I pay for it? Open a beach restaurant, selling what? What are the opening hours? Who is going to cook, me? What about maitre-de? Waiters, Waitresses. Supply chain, including consideration of plastic waste. Be happy – will this make me happy? Will I be grilling my way into an early grave? More questions than answers arise and then that’s when we begin getting serious.
4. Visualise – this is when we use our brain’s highest function, imagination, yes you heard me, imagination, if you imagine something then you can make it happen, that’s basically the boiled down wisdom from Think And Grow Rich. So, how do you visualise? There are many books and articles about the subject, I’ll give you a mechanism here that seems to have worked for me, but please go on and explore further, some people like to draw, to write, whatever form your imagination expresses itself, go for it. Visualisation session. Whilst you’re reading this, imagine the following. Sit back in a comfortable position and imagine you’re about to take a journey into the future, a time-hop, if you’re into sci-fi, maybe you have a TARDIS, a customised De-Lorean, there might be a space warp, you get the picture, or if sci-fi is not your thing maybe imagine your future self sitting by the fireplace with a glass of brandy in hand remembering their youth. You’re going on this journey, you enter your personal time warp and you’re transported ten years into the future. You see in front of you your future house, where is it? Be specific, use your imagination, for me it’s on a beach of course, there is a beach shack restaurant with customers milling around, excited, on holiday, there are people in the water, it’s paradise, and up on the hill there is a tasteful modernist house with white curves and foliage everywhere, I climb the steps and knock the door and surprise, surprise, it’s me who answers the door, future me. Embrace yourself warmly in your usual manner and smile. You’re looking good and achieved your goal. Your future self leans over and whispers something in your ear. What did your future self say? For me it was “You did it Man!” After that it’s time to go back to normal life with that wisdom. Play with the idea, try other things, really make it a thing in your head, give some colour and texture to that pipe dream. Play. Repeat similar exercises often, what colour was the beach shack painted (forget me not blue) – you get the idea.
5. Milestones – ok Rome wasn’t built in a day and my retirement plans won’t be either. Getting more serious about this goal that I’m now pretty excited about, there is a proverbial elephant in the room, how will I fund this seemingly impossible future… however that takes us where we need to be, milestones on the overarching goal – the tropical restaurant retirement plan – those milestones need to include an idea to fund, make a bucket of cash that I can spend as I see fit. I’ve mentioned a couple of times my big idea, my thing I want to create to manage my lists, it’s actually a bit more, it’s a general purpose data storage and relationship engine, a way to create knowledge apps in a way that makes sense to me and hopefully others, so now I have a second goal, write what I previously called Bliss (but the URL was taken) but now called DizzyCard. It’s my idea for implementing the kind of system Doug Englebart described years ago. So my first milestone is to develop and grow DizzyCard to the heights it needs to be at to fund my endeavour, once I decompose DizzyCard, I then discover that I have a skills gap (incopentence) in give areas, so my goal then becomes a requirement to modernise my technology stack, and so-on. You might have similar ideas, other pipe dreams, follow the same steps for each of the goals, turn the milestones of your primary goal into goals in their own right, things that need to happen first before you can achieve your ultimate goal, but always keeping in mind the ultimate goal, it’s self reinforcing and really powerful. I’m not going to share the rest of my thoughts in this article, but hopefully you see where milestones come into play for creating your framework.
6. Write them down – now this might just be me, with my ADHD brain as a factor, keeping in mind what I need to do and when is a non-starter, without the milestones written down as a series of discrete steps, then there is nothing. I still think it’s valuable even if you don’t have that kind of brain though, who wants to permanently keep that detail in the front of their mind? Write down your main goal, with these breakdowns, identify the supporting goals and break these down, per my prior discussion about my weakness with writing things down, what works for me is to keep it focused on the goal and how to achieve that goal, don’t make it a todo list, a todo list in my experience gathers cruft and never really gets todone.
7. And finally, once you’ve done all your thinking and created your shitty first draft of your future plan, reward yourself, in a low-cost way that’s important to you. You’ve just finished an article? (If that’s your thing) – Netflix time! You’ve finally redecorated the spare room? Out for a meal! The reward itself doesn’t matter so much as the acknowledgement that you’ve earned it. Goals are long haul, so celebrate effort, progress, trust me, it will keep you on track.

So that was a worked example of how you’d start to explore a pipe dream to truly turn it into a goal, the goal is the thing to keep in the front of your mind, and the way to manage your todo lists because it answers the all important WHY question, which will always win out over short term hedonistic rewards where you treat yourself without having put in the work.

#3 Prioritising your goals

Once you’ve written down all your goals, decomposing your milestones into acutal tasks to complete, there will definitely be more than you could possibly do in a single day, so how do you decide where to start? My advice is to start with the simplest thing that will advance you towards your stated goal, but if you’re not clear on which next step to take, here’s one way of looking at those goals in the context of goal setting related to happiness described earlier in the article.

The 4 Quardants of Goal Identification

The 4 quadrants of goal setting

With what we’ve learned about how satisfaction is driven by the relationship between autonomy and mastery, we can review the goals we’ve written and add autonomy and mastery which then maps them into one of 4 quadrants. Quadrant II is most associated with long term happiness, so it’s useful to be able to categorise your goals in this journey

Quarant I — Low autonomy, High Mastery

A goal achieved in this quadrant is a good example of extrinsic. You have achieved mastery, like the imagined reluctant Doctor in the prior example, but you didn’t get to choose the goal for yourself and it leaves you dissatisfied.

Quadrant II — High autonomy, High Mastery

A goal achieved in this quadrant is a good example of intrisic. You have achieved mastery and you chose the goal yourself and it leaves you feeling elated, like when a self-driven weight lifter succesfully squats 2x body weight for the first time.

Quadrant III-Low autonomy, Low Mastery

This is the most miserable quadrant, you achieve a goal that you didn’t choose for yourself and it wasn’t even hard to do, so you get little reward. You get the least satisfaction from this quadrant. This is paying the electricity bill territory (unless you were having money problems and finally cleared that debt, but that’s wouldn’t be Low Mastery, would it?)

Quadrant IV-High autonomy, Low Mastery

This is the hmmmm quadrant. You’ve achieved a goal that you set for yourself. It didn’t take mastery, it was maybe even dumb luck. It’s a good thing, you’ve achieved the goal, but you don’t derive a psychological reward from the effort.

For each one of your goals that you’ve created, list out the mastery level required to achieve the goal along with the level of autonomy to predict what kind of outcome you can expect, focus on those goals that drive the greatest amount of satisfaction and they won’t even feel like chores, rather more your life’s work being realised.

There is correlation between this view and the famous Benjamin Franklin quadrants that Covey champions.

#4 What if you get derailed?

Ok, again ADHD, I do things in the moment, and sometimes that’s binge watching nonsense, don’t get me wrong, time and a place for everything, but if it doesn’t provide you with that feeling of satisfaction, then it’s really not for you. The simple thing to say is dust yourself off, forgive yourself and get back on the horse. However, I personally don’t like that advice. You’ve made choices to not work on your goals and do something else instead, hedonistic pleasures perhaps, or just binge watching Rick and Morty again! So I say, don’t forgive yourself, judge yourself or more correctly, judge your goals, your goals drive your behaviour and if you decided that watching TV to extremes was more important that achieving your goals, then you probably have left some goals out, maybe that’s your mechanism for recharging and you’re not focusing enough on self-care, meaning you need that time to recuperate. So by all means forgive yourself, but not flippantly, re-examine your goals, have you captured everything? Hint: get self care onto your goals list, you might miss it on the first pass, but you need to keep the machine running at full capacity and all machines need some time for maintenance, you’re no different. Reflect, reset and then push on.

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#5 Working out your values

The following prompts should help you articulate your values. Think about these questions from a work and personal perspective because sometimes the different context will take your thinking in different directions

❤ Think about your happiest times, what were you doing, who were you with?

❤ Think about your proudest moments, why were you proud, how did it show?

❤ Think about when you felt most fulfilled, what need was satisfied?

❤ Now ponder this list and pick 5–10 items that reflect your thoughts (add a note or highlight as you go to record them)

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Accountability
Achievement
Adaptability
Adventure
Ambition
Autheniticity

Balance
Being the best
Belonging

Calmness
Career
Caring
Collaboration
Commitment
Community
Compassion
Competence
Confidence
Connection
Considered
Contentment
Contribution
Cooperation
Collaboration
Courage
Creativity
Curiosity
Credibility

Dignity
Diversity

Efficiency
Ethics
Excellence
Empowerment
Energy

Fairness
Faith
Forgiveness
Freedom
Fulfilment

Generosity
Gratitude
Growth

Harmony
Honesty
Hope
Humilty

Inclusion
Independence
Inspirational
Initiative
Integrity
Intuition

Justice

Kindness
Knowledge

Leadership
Learning
Loyalty

Making a difference

Never Quit

Openness
Optimism
Order

Passionate
Patience
Perseverance
Power
Presence
Professionalism

Quality

Recognition
Reliability
Resourcefulness
Respect
Responsibility
Risk Taking

Safety
Security
Self control
Self expression
Self respect
Service
Simplicity
Spirituality
Success

Teamwork
Tenacious
Time
Tradition
Trust
Truth

Understanding
Uniqueness
Usefulness

Vision
Vulnerability

Well-being
Wholeheartedness
Wisdom
Work Ethic

Ok, now you’ve reached the bottom of the list, go back and pick the 3 that most resonate with you, in the moment, you can review as often as you like. Maybe you’ve got words not listed above, that’s ok, it’s not exhaustive!

#6 Hit the books!

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As mentioned before, I’ve read so many articles and books and tried every which way to make this stuff work for me, finally coming up with the approach above. Here are the books I found most useful

❤ How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis (My personal bible, I didn’t know about Felix (even though I read his mags) and I was truly sad to learn of his death, like the death of someone I’d come to admire and respect, frank, honest tale with such a bloodthirsty title, and his poetry ain’t half bad either if that’s your type of thing)

❤ Motivation and Goal Setting by Jim Cairo

❤ Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

❤ Get Things Done by Robert Kelsey