🏆 Goals

🤔 Where To Start

Determine the areas of life you want to focus on with your goals. When thinking about these domains, consider how important you find this area of your life and how effective you are at living your values in this area of your life:

👥 Relationships
- ⛪ Community & Environment
- 🫂 Friendship
- 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family & Parenting
- 🥰 Intimate Relationships
🏃 Health & Wellness
- 💪 Physical Health
- 😭 Mental Health
- 🙏 Spiritual Health
- 🎮 Leisure
⚒️ Work
- 💼 Job & Career
- 💰 Finance & Wealth
- 🎓 Education & Learning

🧩 Types of Goals

🛑 Anti-Goals - setting goals to avoid a worst-case scenario as opposed to an ideal best-case scenario. How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?
- To follow this, identify a thing you don’t want in your life (ex: wasting time on the internet) and a related action to help you achieve your anti-goal (ex: block the social media sites that are most distracting).
⛰️ Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG) - goals that take anywhere from 10 to 30 years to achieve and only have a 50 to 70 percent of success. The ultimate stretch goal.
🚶 NICE Goals - From Ali Abdaal. Best used for short-term goals. Stands for:
- Near-term - is this on a weekly or daily scale?
- Input-based - is this focused on the process and not a long-term outcome?
- Controllable - am I relying on outside forces or luck for this?
- Energizing - is there a way to integrate play, power and people into the goals?
🧠 SMART Goals - The gold standard for long-term objective goals in productivity land. Tony Robbins also recommends making them Controllable (am I relying on outside forces or luck for this?) and Flexible (can I adapt my goal if need be?).
- Specific - is the goal clear and well defined?
- Measurable - is it quantifiable so you know you’re making progress?
- Actionable - what do I do to reach this goal?
- Realistic - is this challenging, but not impossible?
- Time-based - when does this need to be done by?
Promotion vs Prevention Goals - Promotion goals involve making good things happen, and prevention goals involve avoiding bad things. Example:
- Promotion: learning a new skill at work because of a genuine curiosity
- Prevention: learning a new skill at work out of fear of becoming obsolete

🎯 Meaning

While achieving goals is an important part of meaning itself, having the other components of meaning established will help you to create more impactful goals. Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger define meaning as follows:

Coherence (how events fit together)
Purpose (having goals and direction)
Significance (a sense of inherent value of one’s existence)

Suggestions for developing meaning from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning:

Striving for an accomplishment (create someting, accomplish a task, etc)
Experience something fully or love someone deeply; don’t focus so much on yourself
Adopt attitude of strength and courage towards unavoidable suffering; resolve to learn from pain

❗Prioritization

With our goals, we want to focus on the most important goals, not necessarily the most urgent.

Commonly neglected high-priority activities are socializing, paperwork, reading, and exercising, simply because they place no clear, active demand on us for our attention and time.

🗺️ Annual Goal Planning

🪞 Reflect on the Past Year

Some useful journal prompts are below:

📅 What happened each month in the past year?
🏆 What were the 3-5 most significant events or achievements in the past year? How did these impact your life?
💪 What were the biggest challenges or obstacles you faced in the last year? How did you overcome them, and what did you learn from these experiences?
🌱 In what ways have you grown or changed as a person over the past year? Consider changes in your beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
❌ Were there goals or aspirations you had for last year that you did not achieve? Reflect on why they were not met and how you feel about it.
🎁 What took you by surprise this past year, whether positively or negatively? How did you adapt to these unexpected events or revelations?
🙏 What are you most grateful for this past year? Think about people, experiences, or opportunities that enriched your life.
💆‍♀️ How did you take care of your physical, mental, and emotional health in the past year? Were there new habits or practices you adopted?
👥 Reflect on your relationships in the past year. How have they evolved? Were there new relationships that had a significant impact on you?
🎓 How did you progress in your career or studies? What were the key learnings and how have they shaped your future aspirations?
🚀 Based on your experiences in the last year, what would you like to do differently this upcoming year? Are there new areas you’d like to explore or changes you want to make?

⭐Find Your North Star

Your North Star tells you what direction you want to travel, and is personal to you. Prompts to consider:

💭 If you had all the money and time in the world, how would you use your talents to serve others?
💸 If money were no object and you didn’t get paid, what would you like to do all day every day? (ie, what naturally excites you?)
👍 What are you actually good at? What would others say you’re good at that you wouldn’t admit to yourself? What is effortless to you that may seem difficult to others? What have you already spent a lot of time building a skill towards?
🎤 You’re attending the TED conference, and everyone in the audience (including you) is deeply moved and inspired by what the speaker is talking about. The speaker is you, 20 years in the future. What is “You + 20 Years” talking about, and what’s so inspiring about it?
🚀 What would you like to do, if you knew you couldn’t fail?
🤷 What would you like to do, even if you knew you’d fail at it?
🌅 What does your ideal ordinary Tuesday look like? What are you doing? Who are you with? How are you spending your time? What makes this day perfect for you?
🌠 What’s one dream you’ve always had but never pursued? Why is it a dream for you? What’s stopped you from pursuing it?
💖 Who are the people you most admire, and why? What qualities do they possess that you wish to emulate?
🌍 If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be and why? How could you contribute to this change?
🌟 Imagine you’ve achieved everything you’ve ever wanted. How have you changed as a person? What qualities and achievements define this future version of yourself?
✍️ What do you want your obituary to say? Write it out.
⚰️ What would you like written on your tombstone? It has to be under 280 characters to fit.

🥇 Choose Yearly Goals

Start with divergent thinking. Write down a bunch of different dreams that you may want to pursue in the next ten years. Consider the following questions if you’re having trouble creating goals:

1️⃣ What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
📚 What do you want to learn?
🎁 What do you want to have?
👤 Who do you want to be?
🎯 What do you want to do?
🌍 Where do you want to go?
🎨 What do you want to create?
🤝 What do you want to contribute to?
🎆 What do you want to experience?
👀 What do you want to see?
🪄 What do you want to try?
🧍 What do you want to stand for?
🥇 What is important in your life?
🥀 What are you currently neglecting?
⌚ Fast forward ten years from now and envision your life at its absolute best. What does it look like? What is the ideal routine you follow?
🪧 What would your life look like 5 years from now if you continued down your current path? If you took a completely different path? If money, social obligations, and what other people thought were irrelevant?

After each of these goals, put a year requirement next to how long the goal will take. Choose either 1, 3, 5, or 10 years for the time frame requirement.

Now, choose goals that you actually want to achieve for the next 1, 3, 5, and 10 years. Primarily focus on 3-5 one year goals to work on.

With your selected list of 3-5 goals, ask:

🤔 Why is this important to you?
♟️ What are the 3-5 major chess moves that will make this goal 80% confident this goal will be reached?
✍️ What will you do to review and adjust the plan if it’s not working?
⚡ Do you have the energy and time to at least put weekly effort towards this goal? Be realistic, do not assume you will magically become a productivity machine.

🧑‍🏭 Productivity Methods

🔨 Tools

✅ Checklists - a tool to help avoid mistakes in complex conditions. The Checklist Manifesto is a great resource to learn more, but general tips:
- Know if it’s a “do and confirm” or “read and do” checklist; the latter will require more detail written out
- Keep steps between 5-9 items
- The point at which you use the checklist should be obvious
📆 Digital Calendar - track meetings and obligations through a tool like Google Calendar, Outlook, etc.
🧠 Second Brain - based on the idea from Tiago Forte. Involves documenting things in a digestible, intelligent way using a method called CODE.
- Capture all the interesting and relevant things you need in a tool like a note-taking app
- Organize and structure your notes in a way you’ll know where to look when you need the information. The best method is subjective, but Tiago recommends using PARA:
  - Projects - tasks linked to a goal with deadlines
  - Areas - spheres of activity with a standard to be maintained over time
  - Resources - topics or themes of ongoing interest
  - Archives - inactive items you don’t need anymore, but may occasionally be useful (ie, old college notes, etc)
- Distill information down into an effective summary for you to reference when you need a refresher. Use bolding, saving only the useful information, and/or executive summaries to not end up with too much information
  - Tip: Large Language Models (LLMs) are great for summarizing large pieces of text into executive summaries
- Express what you have learned with the world in some way (like posting on a blog)
📹 Time Tracking - Use either a paid or open-source tool (I recommend ActivityWatch) to automatically monitor how you’re spending your time. Journaling can also work but is a pain to do consistently (too much friction). When in doubt, ask “Is this how I want to be spending my time?”
100 Blocks a Day - imagine 100 10 minute blocks of time each day - how are you spending those blocks?

📂 Methods

⏱️ 2 Minute Method - if it takes less than 2 minutes, just do it n ow.
3️⃣3️⃣3️⃣ 3-3-3 Method - Developed by Oliver Burkeman:
- 🕳️ 3 Hours of Focused/Deep Work - devote to your most important project
- 📨 3 Shorter Tasks - urgent, but relatively quick tasks that generally don’t take more than 15 minutes (typically emails, calls, etc; common procrastination activities)
- 🧹 3 Maintenance Activities - routine tasks like chores
⏰ 5 Minute Rule - start a task you don’t want to do and say you’ll just do it for 5 minutes. Make it a very small thing so you can actually do it in 5 minutes. You can stop after 5 if you want, but generally once you get started you’ll not want to easily stop.
🧒 ABCDE Method - from Brian Tracy’s Eat the Frog.
- A = must do
- B = should do
- C = would be nice to do
- D = delegate
- E = eliminate
🪟 Eisenhower Matrix - distinguish tasks into 4 categories based on urgency and importance:
- ✅ Do - Urgent & Important
- 🤝 Delegate - Urgent & Not Important
- Assign a dollar value to your time and then delegate anything below that hourly rate to focus on high-leverage work instead (especially tasks you do not enjoy)
- 📅 Schedule - Not Urgent & Important
- ❌ Delete - Not Urgent & Not Important
🔋 Energy Management - identifying when you have high energy vs low energy and adapting your work tasks around that.
Flow State - becoming fully immersed in an activity and experience a sense of enjoyment, focus, and productivity (balance between challenging task and using your skills to complete them)
⚓ Habit Anchoring - Link a new, desired habit to an already established one
🪡 Needle List - identify easily-delayed tasks that continue to poke at you until they’re finished (not work related, not urgent, and only mildly inconvenient) and schedule a regular cadence to knock them out
🍅 Pomodoro Technique - cyclical method. Work for 25/50 minutes, stop for 5/10. Repeat in cycles.
◀️🍅 Reverse Pomodoro Technique - Work for 5/10 minutes, stop for 25/50. Useful if it’s really difficult to get started for whatever reason
1️⃣ Single Tasking - Focus on one task (your most important task) without distractions to interrupt you
🔲 Time Blocking - plan your day in half hour blocks, make list of tasks that need to be done (schedule in half-hour blocks), and include flexible time blocks to protect against unforeseen tasks
- 🗓️ Ideal Week Calendar - Consider what an ideal week would look like for you, and block out reasonable times for your top priorities on a separate calendar in Google Calendar. Focus on current ideal ordinary week and future ideal ordinary week
- 👀 Year at a Glance - Look at your calendar with the days measured vertically and each month as a column, so you can more easily digest what you have planned throughout the year and various accomplishments.
  - Tip: use relevant emojis if you want to track habits each day in a quick visual manner; for example, 🏋️‍♀️ can represent exercising on a specific day
🐫 Two List Method - create up to 25 goals, circle the top 5 you actually want to achieve, and the other 20 goals are in the “Avoid At All Costs” list.

⚠️ Risks

Burnout - a combination of feeling overextended, disengaged, or feeling ineffective. Can figure out based on your stress levels from your workload, connection to work, rewards from work, autonomy in role at work, fairness, and community in current role if you’re unsure.
- Overextended - live at 80% and say no more often
- Disengaged - seek connection and craft more meaningful schedule
- Ineffective - find ways to achieve clear wins and realign with your values
- If all 3, detach your worth from work and embrace garbage time
- Remember pragmatic ambition if you tend to take too much on and get burnt out - set goals that are reasonable to achieve in a year, and give yourself time to actually celebrate the goal (at least 3 months). Don’t constantly chase goals endlessly, and have one project at most you are working on, or else you will burn out.
(Lack of) Motivation & Willpower
- Can be due to not enough drive, too much resistance, and/or a pull to distraction
- Focus more on Want To motivation vs Have To motivation when possible
- To build motivation, get more physical movement in, stay connected to the goal, make small but consistent gestures, and rest and replenish between work
- Sometimes you need to rely on discipline to get the job done, not just feeling a desire to get the job done
Procrastination
- Crystal ball method
  - Imagine it’s one week later, and you haven’t actually started the task you intended to. What are the top three reasons why you didn’t get to it?
    - What can you do to help mitigate the risk of those top three reasons derailing you?
    - Who can you ask for help in sticking to this commitment?
  - What action can you take right now that will help increase the odds that you’ll actually do the task?

🔭 Retrospectives

Daily

Spend 5-10 minutes at the end of every day on this (or whenever you can do this consistently), as this will help you avoid going on autopilot. Ask the following:

What actually happened today?
What gave me energy today?
What tasks or interactions drained my energy?
What was my biggest win?
What did I struggle with?
What changes can I make for tomorrow?

Weekly

Do at the same time at the end of each week. Ask the same questions for daily, but over the past week. Additionally, ask the following:

Did my actions align with my long-term goals?
What goals did I hit?
What areas need improvement?
What will I accomplish in my next 7 days?

Quarterly

Schedule a few hours to do a deep dive into your goals, systems, and current progress.

How is the progress with my quarterly goals going?
Were the goals I set too ambitious, or not ambitious enough?
Do I want to make adjustments to my quarterly goals, and if so, what?
Are my current systems and habits aligned with my long-term goals?

Annually

See Annual Goal Planning for how to do on an annual basis.

💼 Career

Interviews

Generally, answer interview questions with the STAR framework (situation, task, action, result).

Tell me about yourself
What do you do in your current role?
Describe a project or research you’ve done
Describe a time you’ve had to be ethical
Describe a conflict in your previous experience
Describe a time you took initiative
Describe a change in project scope or schedule and how you handled it
Describe a challenge you’ve faced and how you overcame it
Describe a time you worked with others to solve a problem
Describe a mistake or failure in your previous role and how you overcame it
What are you looking for in your next role?
What do you know about the company?
What type of manager do you work best with?
What are your salary requirements? (Never answer this directly and try to get the other side to reveal their range)

Meetings

Define the Meeting Objectives
Create an Agenda + Send Calendar Invites
Create a Safe Space for Collaboration
Strategically Choose Attendees + Appoint Important Roles
Best Practices to Stay on Track
End With Clear Actions, Owners, and Timelines