How to set personal goals
After years of trial and error in goal-setting, I've realized that neither my output nor my well-being has improved. That's when I decided to dramatically reconsider my goal management process.
In today’s newsletter
(Free corner) Mental resource and daily productivity curve;
(Free corner) Why most productivity apps and frameworks don’t work;
(Free corner) Key principles for sustainable goal-setting;
(Free corner) Planning your week and avoiding key pitfalls;
(Paid corner) My personal goal-management system with a downloadable template.
Intro
It was a late spring evening in Tallinn and the sun was still beaming through the office windows. The time has already passed 7 pm and the office was slowly becoming more and more deserted. Like today, I remember how I shut my laptop with a feeling of fulfillment that bordered with joy. I’ve aced my week and didn’t lose sight of a single commitment, I thought. I put on my jacket and went in the direction of an elevator.
Once I exited the office and headed home towards the Old Town, it slowly dawned on me. Not only I was able to deliver most of the planned workload, but I was fully responsible for structuring this workload and defining priorities. Even more so, I was learning how to make sense of the dynamically changing uncertainty around me.
This hasn’t always been like that.
Being a productivity geek over the years, I've tried most of the frameworks (GTD, Personal Kanban, SMART e.t.c.) and a bunch of apps (To-Do, Todoist, Notion, Trello e.t.c.), only to discover that neither my output nor well-being improved. The backlog was endlessly expanding, the work days grew longer (eating up my personal time budget), and multi-tasking became heavier.
As a result, I felt exhausted and dreaded the sheer idea of opening my to-do list. A set of spillover effects came marching in - procrastination, a mixed bag of feelings (feeling sorry for sacrificing your whole life to work demands, feeling guilty for not doing enough) with apathy as a cherry on top of the cake.
I’ve fallen into that productivity trap multiple times. By the third time I’ve experienced the same cocktail of emotions, it occurred to me that there might be certain triggers that are responsible for this, and if I could defuse them, I could gain an upper hand.
That was the moment I decided to radically reconsider the way I approach my weekly and day-to-day goal-setting.
Setting out the definitions
In order to avoid any confusion, let’s outline the definitions from the get-go:
Goals - mid-term targets with clear reasoning (both quantitative and qualitative);
Tasks - short-term duties that help to achieve mid-term goals.
In this article, I would be using goals and tasks as synonyms for the sake of simplicity.
Mental resource
There’s an ongoing battle of opinions regarding the limits of our daily mental resources. Some researchers believe that willpower is limited, others insist that the studies on the ego-depletion and willpower are biased, and some claim that our ability to exert mental focus is similar to an emotion, which fades over time (Nir Eyal wrote a great post about the willpower debates a few years ago). Whichever way our mental resource manifests itself, based on my own observations I find it depleting by the end of a focused working day.
There might be a bunch of factors impacting my ability to focus (excitement about anything, carbs and sugar kicking in my bloodstream, caffeine e.t.c.), but if we take the most average working day, I do feel exhausted and unable to exert mental effort after a certain period of time (unless spiked by adrenaline out of absolute necessity).
From this perspective, I prefer to think about it as fuel. You have a certain amount of it to ignite your day, it can be spent efficiently to get to your destination, burned at higher speeds or simply wasted by going around in circles. That’s why proactively managing your daily goals is becoming crucial.
Daily Productivity Curve
Each of us has a certain biologically predisposed chronotype (morning larks, evening owls, and in-between) and a corresponding “productivity curve” (driven by the underlying circadian rhythm).
What this means is that there are certain timeframes of the day when you are "at your best”, “at your average” and “at your worst”. At your best would imply that you have the most creative resource and willpower, at your worst - you can only answer with one-liner responses in Slack.
It’s best to reflect on what your own time curve is and then allocate the activities accordingly: prioritize creative tasks or important decisions for the “at your best” time slots (shown in green) and use the remainder for less cognitively demanding activities (yellow and red). It’s also more efficient to burn your fuel during your highest productivity peaks.
The concept of “Cognitive friction”
It’s a simple and well-known fact that our brains are lazy and tend to preserve as much energy as possible. Anything new or unfamiliar eats up more precious calories that could be used for survival.
That’s the whole premise behind cognitive friction. If something is foreign, it requires learning. Learning is something we tend to unconsciously avoid. Hence, no matter how ruthless your fight with new interfaces or frameworks will be if the interface is cumbersome and frameworks are multi-layered - you will tend to avoid them.
That’s the first and the key principle in goal-setting - the initial approach you take should be as simple as possible. Dumbed down to the point where you and your brain can agree on a sustained process. Later, you can add complexity but do this slowly and gradually as your brain internalizes and makes each step of the way habitual.
Why productivity apps don’t work?
Apps are merely tools to visualize your backlog. The problem comes with interfaces. To tend to a multitude of “jobs to be done” even the most seemingly straightforward task trackers sacrifice simplicity for the versatility of use.
Roles, teams, timing, calendars, etc. - when you stack all of those capabilities atop each other, you’re going to end up with a product that your brain will simply refuse to adopt. That’s cognitive friction to the max.
No wonder, why productivity apps have such a dramatic drop in retention over a prolonged use period (1 day - 17.0%, 7 days - 7.2%, 30 days - 2.8%).
Why frameworks don’t work?
Because they are frameworks and were tailored to solve a specific problem within a specific context. Blindly using a framework is like trying to squeeze a square into a round hole.
I’m not implying that productivity frameworks are useless, they are not. What is important to note, is that they are mere tools within your toolkit and should be used either partially or fully to solve a certain problem at hand.
For instance, Kanban is a great tool to visualize operational progress. However, it’s just a tool. If you force all of your weekly activities into a single three-column structure, eventually you might lose focus, start switching contexts, and get overwhelmed.
The same thing with Pomodoro, it’s a useful tool for sharpened focus, but it will not solve all of your goal-setting needs.
Accessibility
Another aspect of “cognitive friction”, which is highly disregarded - is accessibility. If something is beyond your reach when it’s needed, the friction barrier increases. A simple example, you open the fridge and realize there are no eggs left. No eggs mean no breakfast, so you have to go to a store. Going to the store adds a lot of friction. You have to dress, get out of your apartment, walk, find the eggs, wait in the queue, make contact with a shop assistant, etc. If you substitute it with dark store delivery directly to your door, it reduces the barrier of access greatly, increasing the chances you’re not going to dread doing it next time.
What does it have to do with goal-setting, you might ask? In reality, our brains are very sensitive to the smallest increases in cognitive load. You might not have noticed, but the way we access the goal-tracking apps/services is crucially important to sustained use. For example, your favorite goal-tracking service only has a web version, so you open a browser, open a tab, open a website, and log in. But after a while, you might have a hundred tabs opened and wayfinding becomes a chore. Contrast it with opening a native app, which is always visible and doesn’t require you to jump through hoops.
Of course, you can have a perfect web setup: an extension for fast access, Arc browser in a separate screen that closes the tabs for you automatically. Anyways, the takeaway is, your goal-tracking service needs to be within a millisecond of reach. You don’t have to think and search for it. The longer the funnel, the less likely it’s going to become a sustainable habit.
Sustainable goal-setting
According to B.J. Fogg (a Stanford professor, whose teachings inspired a spree of Silicon Valley unicorns), the formula for habit formation consists of three elements:
Behavior change = Motivation + Ability + Prompt
Where ability literally means “ease of use”. The easier something is (or the less cognitive friction there is), the more likely it can develop into a habit. Motivation is how eager you are to do it and the prompt is a cue to help you get back into the context.
To put it into the practical dimension:
Motivation = There should be either a reward (a dopamine hit) or punishment (lower performance scores) in order to create that sense of urgency. Both can be driven by the deviation from your goal-setting stack;
Ability = simple dumbed-down interface of a to-do tracker, solving only one task at hand, and accessible within 1-click proximity;
Prompt = a visual cue/trigger reminding you about the backlog (e.g. “omnipresent” icon on your desktop screen).
Once you start putting it into action, through trial and error, eventually it’s going to become second nature.
Pitfalls to avoid
Unlimited time budget fallacy
Starting your goal-setting journey should begin with accepting your limitations. You only have 16 active hours in a day (~8 dedicated to sleep) that somehow need to be balanced between your work and personal life. Each incoming request is basically an inquiry to take away a chunk of your time.
A constant thing I’m seeing is the “superhero syndrome” (was a victim of it myself). In an attempt to please everyone and address all the incoming requests, managers tend to stretch their work time budget to the point where little or no personal life is left. Not only this is not sustainable, but it’s also counter-productive. Exhaustion eventually builds up, resulting in burnout and signs of toxic attitudes towards work and colleagues.
When you take on a certain responsibility, you are always making a trade-off, whether consciously or unconsciously. If you think you can stretch your work time budget, you can’t, it’s a fallacy. In reality, you are making a trade-off and rejecting a part of your personal life.
Lack of visible priorities
Another side of the “unlimited budget fallacy” is the lack of visible priorities. You’re always setting them, whether you like it or not, the only difference is - you can do it either consciously or unconsciously. Making choices on auto-pilot is similar to avoiding responsibility, eventually, the payback is going to get you, but it’s delayed, hence the optical illusion. One more caveat with reactive auto-pilot goal management is that you might fall for really low-leverage, but seemingly urgent minutia.
Multi-tasking
Multi-tasking is attractive and simple to fall for. The premise is that you can do multiple exercises at the same time, thus resolving your to-do list faster. Brilliant. Unfortunately, for 98% of us, it’s wishful thinking (2% of people are natural multi-taskers with enough cognitive flexibility). Multi-tasking is your “mental fuel” killer, you’re literally moving at high speeds, burning gas, but missing a lot of details and obstacles on your road. The worst outcome is that you can crash into one of those obstacles.
It’s a widely known fact that multi-tasking isn’t effective, but what is seldom spoken about are its dangers. There is pretty solid scientific backing:
your cognitive resource is spent much faster, resulting in faster exhaustion (multiplied by an ongoing “context switch”)
you develop unhealthy mental habits for distorted focus, which can further translate into other areas of your life;
multi-tasking greatly decreases your cognitive abilities and results in sub-par work (the effect is equal to a joint of marijuana or a lack of night’s sleep).
In my personal experience, once I zone out and lose awareness, multi-tasking creeps in immediately. When I’m tired, I tend to fall for it even more frequently, leading to an endless productivity depletion loop. The only way to avoid it is by consciously paying attention.
Losing yourself in the process
One typical Sunday afternoon, I started feeling dread about the upcoming day at work. But why? I’ve asked myself. I love my work, have a great team, and face inspiring and stimulating challenges daily. After a series of reflections, it dawned on me - I started losing myself to the to-do list. My whole life became compressed into a single backlog and 99% of it is work-related. Of course, I had some personal time over the weekend, but a fair chunk of it was consumed by chores - changing car tires, doing groceries, etc.
I’ve decided to try out an experiment. First, I’ve added an additional “Personal goals” stream to my weeklies alongside the work-related duties. Secondly, I’ve purposefully added one personal goal (non-work-related) to be completed during my working day.
Such a simple tweak worked wonders. Not only I’ve offloaded a large portion of my chores from the weekend, but somehow the “Sunday dread” has literally evaporated. It felt as If I was reclaiming myself in the process.
Getting to action
Let’s make sense of it all and get to the action. What is my goal-setting system? Which tools do I use? How do I balance my workload? Define focus areas and priorities? Dive in to learn all my tricks of the trade + access the template that you can start using immediately.