How to set goals and stick to them
A guide to designing life goals and how I've use this to achieve more
In my last newsletter, I mentioned that I wanted to spend my next newsletter reviewing my progress toward my New Year’s resolutions. That was over a month ago, but I’m finally getting around to it.
If you’re new around here, I write a (somewhat) weekly newsletter about my goals, my journey towards achieving them, and, more generally, how I’m working to make the best out of life. I started this in January of 2021, which allowed me to accomplish way more in 2021 than I had ever imagined. I set some new goals this year, and since we’re almost six months into the year, I think it’s as good a time as ever to check how I’m doing with this year’s goals.
I thought this would also be an excellent time to review my theory on designing easily attainable goals.
A good goal should have three main characteristics:
It should be achievable. This means that whatever the goal is, it has to be something that you can either accomplish or not, a binary. Either you completed it, or you didn’t. An example of a goal that isn’t achievable is: “I want to work out more.” Here, unless you clearly define how much you were working out before, there isn’t a clear marker of when you have achieved the goal. Instead, you could say, “I want to work out once a week” (like I did last year).
Next, a goal should be measurable. The key here is to set a goal and associate a metric that you can measure to see your progress. If you want to lower your screen time, record how much time you spend on your phone now and then see how that evolves. If a goal isn’t measurable, it’s tough to see progress and stick to positive change.
Finally, a goal should be habit-able. Here, I’m applying a new meaning to the word: capable of being broken down into a simple habit. In the past, I’ve gone in-depth into how to build and cement new habits. In brief, all habits, positive or negative, are made up of four parts. Let’s take checking Instagram as an example. The first part is the trigger, the thing that sets off the routine. In our case, this might be an Instagram notification. The next part is the craving. When you see the notification, like “so-and-so liked your post,” adrenaline starts to pump through your body in preparation for checking the app. Third, the routine happens. This is the actual “active” part of the habit, what your brain has learned to do automatically due to repetitive action. In this case, you click the notification and open the app. Finally, the fourth and most crucial part, the reward. You are confronted with the number of likes on your photo, and endorphins flood your nervous system. Negative habits are so quickly built because they naturally offer a large reward for an easy routine. That’s why it’s much easier to get addicted to TikTok than to jogging. But with enough thought and effort, a positive goal can be turned into a habit (be habitable, if you will) by just fulfilling these four steps.
So that is the theory. All well-constructed goals will have these three characteristics, but you’ll see that even I choose to forgo some of these characteristics in some instances. I especially do this when a goal is creative. As I’ve written about in the past, creativity often comes in spurts, so trying to fit it into a rigid definition of a goal can be demoralizing and do more harm than good.
Anyway, enough talking about theory. It’s time to dive into my goals and see how I’ve done so far. I’ll take each goal at a time, go over what I’ve achieved, what has worked or been challenging, and how I see each goal evolving as we near the mid-year mark. I’ll also discuss how each goal fits the three characteristics I detailed above and why they sometimes might not.
Let’s jump in!
1. Write a somewhat weekly newsletter.
This goal has been going okay, but not great. So far, I’ve sent out nine newsletters this year. If my math is correct, it is the 25th week of the year.
I would have loved to have posted a newsletter every week, but things get in the way! I had already discussed this when I set my goals in January, which is why I included the “somewhat” in the goal. This is what I wrote then:
I am adding a caveat that I am allowed (and even encouraged) to sometimes miss a week here and there. This can be for any reason: work, vacation, not feeling up to it… I’m allowed to take time off. […] So, I’ll write a weekly newsletter, but I’ll miss a few and that’s okay. Hopefully this relieves some of the stress and allows the creative juices to flow without added pressure.
Unfortunately, I’ve missed more weeks than I would have liked, mainly due to a particularly unmotivated/busy period between February 13 and April 10. That’s life.
Adding the caveat has released some of the stress and disappointment I felt last year when I would miss a newsletter, so that is a positive. However, I want to write more consistently, as it gives my life structure and energy.
This goal is measurable and habitable. I know exactly how many newsletters I have written in a given timeframe, and I can set up daily habits to ensure that I write a little every day. However, due to the open-endedness of the “somewhat,” this goal isn’t achievable. I am giving myself a pass here because this goal fits into the “creative” category, I can be less strict with the “achievement” aspect. I want to write as close to weekly as possible without adding undue pressure on myself.
My prescription for the future: I need to prioritize writing this newsletter a little each day. I have “work on newsletter for an hour” on my list of daily tasks, but it tends to be at the bottom of the list, which I rarely get to. I will try moving it up on the list and see if that has a positive effect.
2. Read an hour a day.
Just like last year, I’ve loved this goal. Reading is fun but also feels like such a significant achievement every time you do it. It’s such an easy win if you make it an easy habit to follow.
For exact numbers, I’m a little late on the one hour a day, as I’m currently doing my one hour for April 23rd (which means I’ve only read an average of 39.4 minutes per day). Still, I’ve already finished 14 books and am reading four more! I’m proud of myself for this goal. Last year, reading thirty minutes a day, I finished 23 books. There are only ten more to go before I pass that, and I think it should be easy to do at this point.
In terms of the characteristics, this is the perfect goal. It is achievable and measurable and very much easy to turn into a habit because it is a gratifying process. I know many measure their reading in terms of the number of books or pages read daily, but I prefer time. It removes the pressure of reading at a certain speed, as there are certain books you want to spend more time with and others you can zip through quickly.
Overall, I don’t think there’s anything I need to correct with how this goal is going. I’ll have caught up on my tardiness soon, and then I should easily be able to keep up the momentum.
3. Run a marathon.
I have not yet run a marathon.
However, I have been running relatively regularly. In the coming weeks, I will sign up for the Cape Cod Marathon and start training.
I’ve had a few minor injuries when training. This is minorly worrying, although I think this won’t hinder me in the long term. I’m also going to see a chiropractor soon, which hopefully will help with these injuries if they keep coming back.
This goal is achievable in the most straightforward sense: I either do it, or I don’t. Of course, this by no means makes it easy to achieve… From a measurement and habits standpoint, I measure my running using a combination of my Apple Watch (to track my runs), Strava, and Excel, and I’ve tried to set up a running habit, for better or worse. It is still a work in progress, but no one said this would be easy.
I need to keep running, sign up for a marathon, and then stick to a training program without getting majorly injured (only minorly!).
4. Make time for my mental health.
Until writing this, I admit I had forgotten about this goal, which says a lot about how active I’ve been in pursuing it.
The truth is that my mental health has been pretty good. I haven’t been meditating or doing anything particular to “invest” in my mental health, but overall, things have been good.
I have set up my work/life in a way that allows me to succeed at work without too much stress and spend lots of time outdoors (thanks to my dog!) and with friends. It’s a good life.
I will say this, though: I tend to feel worse on weeks that I don’t achieve what I’ve set out to achieve, like writing my newsletter. Naively, I might say that the solution is to go out and achieve what I’ve set out to do. But of course, this isn’t always possible. This probably indicates that I tie my mental health and self-worth too much to external factors rather than just being at peace with myself. But hey, I’m no psychiatrist.
Part of the reason I haven’t actively made progress towards this goal is that it doesn’t fit the characteristics of a well-designed goal. There isn’t a target to achieve, and what could I measure, time spent meditating? Keep a score of my mood day to day? And it’s also hard to turn this into a habit unless I pick specific activities, such as meditating, to count towards “making time for my mental health.”
Here’s what I want to do: I want to get back to meditating more often. Not every day, like I attempted last year, but just a little more often. For example, on days when I’m feeling frustrated, I can try and turn to that. It always makes me feel great whenever I do end up doing it, so I should do it more often.
I don’t want to change this goal now, but it clearly is not designed right. Although the sentiment is a good one, if I want to turn this into a practical goal for next year, I’ll have to think about how to translate this goal into one that fits the characteristics.
5. Reserve one day a week for being creative.
This, I’ll admit, I haven’t been doing.
I think part of the problem is that it is pretty open-ended. “Being creative” can refer to many things, even writing my newsletter. This is how I wrote about it in January:
What does this mean in practice? No work or tasks that don’t promote creativity (except for necessities like food shopping/walking the dog, etc.). If possible, I’d also like to limit consumption, even reading if I’m able to get ahead on it during the week. One day a week where all I do is create. Making social media content, painting, or trying something new entirely… anything creative. My hope is that this will promote my creativity more than ever before.
What ended up happening is that the first few Saturdays in the year, when I tried to do this, I was late on my newsletter writing during the week, so I just had to catch up on that. Saturday just turned into my newsletter-writing day rather than my creativity day. Then, when I put off writing the newsletter for a bit, this completely fell to the wayside.
Of course, it makes sense when looking at this goal through the lens of the three characteristics. This goal is achievable but not easy to measure or turn into a habit. You either do it, or you don’t, but that’s it.
Still, I want to give it another try. I think a day a week for being creative is a fantastic idea. I’ll let you know how that goes.
6. Learn something new every month.
In January, I learned and wrote about Web 3.0. If I think about it, I could probably think of four other things I learned this year, but they would not all be conscious decisions I had sought to learn for this goal.
(For fun, here’s the list:
In February, I downloaded the Chess app and learned a few new Chess opens.
In March, I learned that attempting to run four half marathons as part of marathon training in the same month you run your first ever half marathon is probably not going to go well.
In April, I learned a warm-up and stretching routine for before and after my runs.
In May, I learned how to make Bananas Foster, an easy but impressive recipe since you have to flambee the bananas.)
I do need to get back on top of this, though. It is achievable, measurable, and most importantly can easily be turned into a habit. I need to pick something to learn each month and dedicate time each week to learning that thing.
What I want to learn in June: basic sewing skills. I want to know two main things: how to sew on a button (I have a few vintage button-ups that have lost some buttons, and I am not ready to part ways with them) and patch holes, specifically in pants. These might be elementary skills for some of you, but I have no idea how either works, so I have to learn!
7. Collaborate with other creatives.
This, sadly, I haven’t done at all. I am working on some writing for my friend Francesco’s “Tough Calls” newsletter, but that’s the extent of any collaboration I’ve done this year.
With the foresight of the three goal characteristics I outlined above, there are obvious reasons why I haven’t made progress on this goal. First off, what should I measure? How many people I’ve collaborated with? How much time I spend collaborating? And from an achievability standpoint, when have I accomplished this goal? After one collab?
The key will be finding a way to turn this into a habit. It isn’t immediately obvious how I would go about that, but it’s the only way I’ll make headway. I also have to make this goal “achievable.” Officially, I will consider this goal achieved once I have completed three projects in collaboration with others. That sounds achievable enough.
To make this happen, I must solidify this into a habit. I am thinking of either setting aside time weekly to focus on collaborative work and, before there is any work to be done, using that time to reach out to friends and other people I’d like to work with. It’s the only way to get this done.
I think this process warrants its own post, so subscribe if you want to see how that goes!
8. Build a bucket list.
This goal was last on the list for a reason. I haven’t touched it yet, but I had always intended to leave this for the later months of the year.
The idea with this goal was to come up with a definitive list (100 items would be ideal) of things I want to do before I die. I wanted to spend the year trying things out, learning new things, and then taking from my reading and my findings to write a comprehensive list of experiences that I would like to have with the limited time I have left.
I think it is time I start making headway on this list. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I want to set myself up for success. So starting next week, I’m going to assign myself the task (and hopefully this turns into an easy-to-follow habit) of coming up with five new bucket list items. There are 27 weeks left in the year, so if my math is correct, that should leave me with more than enough goals on my bucket list by the end of the year. Some of these goals might fall off the list if I feel they aren’t as important as others, and hopefully, I can land on an even 100. Then, I’ll kick off 2023 by going out and trying to complete as many of these bucket list goals as possible. It should make for some good newsletter content…
Until then, I’ll also post periodic updates about how my bucket list is coming along, so you get a taste of what next year might entail.
So there you go: eight goals, decent progress on multiple fronts, and some tasks for the coming weeks to ensure I achieve all of them by the end of the year. It should be a good time.
I always love hearing from the readers, so if you have any feedback or comments (or even book recommendations), I invite you to like this post and leave a comment.
And, of course, if you’re new here, I’d love to have you as a subscriber.
Thanks again for reading every week (or whenever I get around to writing these). See you next time ❤️
For the running I think it's worth looking into what types of exercise you can do to strengthen your knees. I think a good classic is a one legged bend (nothing drastic +/-135° angle), the balancing helps develop small important muscles in the knee I think. This might be complete bullshit but worth looking into it as could be a useful preventative bit of work and should be fairly easy to integrate with your workouts or runs.
swag