Refocuser » Goal Setting

The Beginner’s Guide to Self-Tracking & Analysis

Mike Torres — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:21:02 +0000

‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.’ – Ben Franklin

Self-tracking – or personal analytics as some call it – is a relatively new phenomenon brought about by the ubiquity of cheap sensor technology and the internet. It’s a space that’s just now coming into its own thanks to the tech getting cheaper and lots of interested, data-driven geeks finding each other on the net and exchanging ideas.

The potential impact of self-tracking on personal health and overall well being could someday rival the discovery of penicillin – seriously – and we’re just at the beginning of what’s going to be a huge wave of self-improvement and individualized health care based on self-tracking and analysis.

I’ve recently entered the world of self-tracking… and there’s no going back. My weight, body fat percentage, running speed and distance, calories burned, sleep patterns, investments, genetic predispositions, daily routines, mood, and even commute times are tracked and analyzed. Sound a little excessive? Maybe. But only because it’s still not 100% automatic. But it’s really, really close to being “set it and forget it”, and for me, the benefits far outweigh the few minutes I spend each day tracking things.

What is Self-Tracking?

The basic concept behind self-tracking is simple: our ability to determine cause and effect through our memory or experience alone is inherently faulty. It’s tough enough for most of us to remember a birthday or anniversary. Ask us to calculate how many calories we burned yesterday and how that affected our sleep last night and our blood pressure will rise – and we won’t even be able to detect that in order to prevent it from happening in the future!

Our minds play games with us… they trick us into seeing and believing things that aren’t there in order to "protect us". We can rationalize most anything we do or say (science shows this) which means deciding not to exercise because we’re busy or just don’t feel like it is easy to justify. Of course, machines aren’t as easily tricked.

You can’t trick yourself when you have hard data. You can’t convince yourself of something that the data doesn’t show. Data tells you almost everything you need to know, whether you like it or not… and then implicitly asks, "what do we do about this now?"

Data isn’t affected by human emotion. It just is. It’s difficult to look at data and "talk it down" like you can with your ego. It’s ruthless.

You may have heard of the Hawthorne Effect. The basic premise behind it is what makes self-tracking worth doing. Basically your behavior can be improved or modified just in response to being studied, even if no other changes around you occur. Does it matter if the person studying your behavior isn’t actually a person at all but a $50 sensor strapped to your shoe? Not if you plan on leveraging the data.

We’ve all had that feeling of wanting to get credit for something. If you’re tracking your morning run, and you know it’ll be posted online, do you think you’ll walk that last half-mile? It’s amazingly powerful what a little pressure from data can do.

We also all have consistent patterns and routines each day. These patterns (or habits) are a big determining factor in whether we’re happy or not, energetic or not, fit or not, or healthy or not. But it’s hard for us to accurately determine exactly which of those patterns affect us the most in the most important ways. Do you sleep better when you exercise in the morning or at night? Does that better sleep affect your mood or your ability to focus on the computer screen at work? Does that nagging back pain get better or worse when you take a hot bath or is light morning stretching the key?

You’ll never know unless you pay closer attention.

So people are turning to self-tracking to help. It’s a way to take all the data we generate everyday and start to draw correlation or causation between the events. It’s not entirely dissimilar from how Microsoft, Google, or Amazon build software at the scale they do – lots of attention is paid to how people actually use stuff instead of how they say they do. Data is king.

How to Get Started

Getting started with self-tracking is as easy as grabbing a pen and paper and making a small behavioral change to start tracking something (yes, the number of lattes you drink each week counts…) The easiest thing to do of course is to get something that does the tracking for you. If you can afford any of the tools below (like Nike+ or the Fitbit) you might want to consider picking one up and seeing how it helps… because honestly, most people don’t want to spend the time required to track things by hand.

1. Start with one thing you’d like to improve. The best way to do this is to ask yourself that ultimate question: if I changed one single thing that would have the biggest impact on my quality of life, what would it be? The things you consider will be entirely personal and unique to you, but there are also probably some commonalities with others. For instance, when Gretchen Rubin started her Happiness Project last year, she knew that increasing her energy through exercise would pay dividends all year. So she started there. Some other ideas: lowering your blood pressure, losing five pounds, getting more sleep, meditating every day, spending less money on impulse buys, etc.

2. Commit to tracking it for thirty days at first. Thirty days may not be long enough to drop 50 pounds, but it’s probably long enough to see if self-tracking is for you. Don’t let yourself off the hook until the thirty days are up… by then, you may find it isn’t too hard to keep up after all.

3. Spend some time each week looking at your data and drawing conclusions. Come up with your own theories about why things are happening. There’s little point in self-tracking if you aren’t going to learn from the data! If you’re someone who does a weekly review, that’s probably a good time to also look at the data you’ve collected and figure out what you’re going to tweak.

4. Test your new hypothesis. Make a discovery about yourself based on the data at hand? Think you know how to “fix” it? Try making a small adjustment to your behavior and see what happens. Do you focus better in meetings when you have green tea, espresso, or a Diet Coke? You won’t know until you test it out.

5. Rinse and repeat. Once you’ve maxed out on one area, take a look at tracking and analyzing another. Could you improve another aspect of your life just by starting to track it? Who knows? Give it a shot.

Tools

As it stands, there isn’t a single, central repository out there for data gathering and analysis across all the various tools. And there isn’t just one thing you can strap to your wrist to track everything from your cycling distance to your checking account.

But there are a bunch of great tools available for specific things, or provided you’re OK doing a little bit of aggregation on your own.

Here are some of my favorite tools for self-tracking. You can’t go wrong with any of these.

Nike+. If you’re a runner and you aren’t using Nike+ or a GPS unit like a Garmin Forerunner, you’re missing out! It’s incredibly empowering to track your distance, speed/pace, and frequency over time. Both tools also work with sites like Dailymile to help you challenge and motivate others as well. I’ll likely do a follow-up post on both Nike+ and Dailymile at some point.
Fitbit. One of the cooler things to come out in a while, the Fitbit is a small sensor you attach to your clothing (or via arm band) to track your fitness and sleep. Things like sleep patterns, steps taken, and calories burned can be huge motivators and important data points in an overall self-tracking program. Just knowing how many steps you’ve taken (vs. what your goal is) can motivate you to ditch the elevator and take the stairs instead. Remember: just knowing you’re tracking it and that you have have a goal actually matters.
Withings scale. A scale that sends your weight, body fat %, and body mass index wirelessly to a private web site. An iPhone app that gives you a simple chart to see how far you’ve come. All in all, the Withings scale is probably my favorite gadget this year. It’s like peeking into the future. Check out this mega review of it by DC Rainmaker.
Joe’s Goals. One of my favorite sites to track daily habits and something I use all the time to keep myself moving in the right direction. We all like to get gold stars for getting stuff done – Joe’s Goals is just another way to do so. I’ve written about Joe’s Goals before, check it out.
12 Goals: Excel Spreadsheet. A basic spreadsheet containing everything you need to track your vision, goals, and your daily progress throughout the year. A Refocuser exclusive!
Track Your Happiness.org. See “how your happiness varies depending on what you are doing, who you are with, where you are, what time of day it is, and a variety of other factors.” Very easy to use!
Mint. The best way to analyze your finances across all your accounts and investments. If you have more than $1 sitting in a bank account and you aren’t using Mint, you should give it a shot.
Foursquare. More social than analytical, it’s still a great way to track how often you’re visiting the same places and when. The stats page is a lot of fun; for instance I know that Saturday is my busiest day of the week, that I’ve visited 46 different venues in the past few months, and that I drink a lot of coffee at the local café where I’m the unofficial “mayor”
23andMe. Plan for your own health and wellness with the latest in genetic science. Find out which diseases you may have increased risk for and what you can do about it. You can also learn fun stuff like if you’re likely a fast caffeine metabolizer (I probably am, yay!) or have have bitter taste perception.

That’s just a short list to start, but they’re all things either I’ve personally used (in fact, all but Track Your Happiness I use all the time). For a more complete list of tools, check out:

Resources @ The Quantified Self

The Hardest Part

Believe it or not, the hardest thing when self-tracking isn’t the change you need to make to your daily routines in order to maintain it. It’s actually learning something you may not want to know and not taking it too seriously. You want to use the data to your advantage… not become a slave to it.

Does knowing that your blood pressure is borderline high make your blood pressure worse? Well, you’ll only know if you start tracking it, right? And chances are if you do discover this, you’ll be motivated to fix the root cause.

The key with self-tracking is to work under the assumption that knowing is always better than not knowing. If you don’t agree with this, you might want to think about why. Is it out of fear? Or is it because you know you’ll overly stress over what the data implies?

Before you get started, make a promise to yourself that you will use the data to improve your well being – and that if you ever find yourself overanalyzing or stressing over the details, that you’ll back off. Or at a minimum, you’ll work to get to the bottom of what’s driving your fear.

This process should be enlightening, but it should also be fun. Don’t let it own you.

More Resources

Wired Magazine: Know Thyself
Wired Magazine: The Nike Experiment (about running and Nike+)
New York Times: The Data-Driven Life
The Happiness Project: Think About Your Routines
The Quantified Self (blog)
Total Recall (book)

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12 Goals: Tools You Can Use

Mike Torres — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:30:00 +0000

Before starting here, you might first want to read the introduction, Step 1, Step 2, & Step 3.

Twelve Goals (or 12 Goals) is a goal-setting program for beginners. If you’ve never set goals before – or if you’ve tried and failed – Twelve Goals can help get you unstuck and on path to achievement. There’s nothing magical or mystical about this process at all. In fact, it’s downright boring and overly practical; you aren’t going to find any talk about magnetism, psychic powers, or the law of attraction. What you’ll find is a systematic way to look at your personal goals over the course of a year, along with some step-by-step advice and accompanying tools to help you achieve them.

Twelve Goals is still very much a work in progress. My hope is that the program will adapt and evolve over the course of 2010 based on feedback from you! If you ever forget how to find these posts, they will be available at www.12goals.com (or www.twelvegoals.com).

Now that you’ve made your way through the details of the Twelve Goals program, it’s time to get serious by employing the use of some tools. These tools are meant solely to supplement your plan, not to replace or define it. In order to get the most out of these tools, you have to have your vision, your monthly goals, and your habits & tasks ready to execute throughout the year. These tools are only as good as your plan is. Far too many people in situations like this get more carried away with the tools themselves, tweaking every setting imaginable, instead of focusing on the thing that matters: the plan itself.

So before going further, please do spend the time to make sure your plan is as complete as you can make it.

Excel Spreadsheet

The following (very basic) Twelve Goals Excel spreadsheet contains everything you need to track your vision, goals, and your daily progress throughout the year. It consists of three main worksheets (which you can switch between using the tabs at the bottom).

Vision. On this sheet, type your personal vision in whatever form you have it. There’s nothing magic about this particular worksheet, it’s just text you can look back on throughout the year. Refer back to Step 1 for recommendations on creating your vision.
Monthly Goals. Here’s where you’ll put your goals & primary habits for the year (of course feel free to rearrange if you’re not starting in January). There’s space to paste an image that represents your goal, and there’s a “progress indicator” arrow to help you see how you’re doing. Refer back to Step 2 for recommendations on setting monthly goals.
- To use the progress indicator, you just have to enter a number from 0 to 4 in the cell. 0 is “not on track”, 1 is “trending poorly”, 2 is “going OK”, 3 is “trending well”, and 4 is “complete!” Update how your goals are going from time to time!
Tracking. This tab is a daily tracker. The idea is simple: it’s a calendar which helps you mark the number of days you’re on-track and the number of days you’re off-track. It gives you basic counts and a percentage (think of this as your batting average for the year – except you want to be closer to 80% than 30%).
All you have to do is enter a “Y” on days that you’re feeling good about your progress (they light up GREEN) or an “N” on days that you didn’t make progress (they light up RED). The 10 seconds you spend each day doing this could make the biggest difference in your year. Refer back to Step 3 for more on daily tracking.

The spreadsheet doesn’t attempt to replace a real task manager however – Excel isn’t really the best way to track daily tasks without a lot of custom work. There are better task management tools listed below like Microsoft Outlook, Things, ToodleDo, or Remember the Milk. If you use the 12 Goals spreadsheet in conjunction with a task manager, you’ll have a good progression from vision->goals->tasks & habits->daily tracking.

Note: this spreadsheet has been tested for compatibility with Excel 2007 and 2010. If you have an earlier version of Excel, some features may not work as they should.

Click the icon to download (XLS)

PocketMod Printout

The PocketMod printout is a unique way to track your progress. For a single year, you’ll need to print 2 PocketMods, one for Months 1-6 and another for Months 7-12.

Click the image to download (PDF)

Here’s how to get the most out of this PocketMod:

First, you may need to install Adobe Reader to view the file.
Next, print the PocketMod on any printer.
Then fold the PocketMod (written instructions or watch a video)
Finally, you’ll need to fill it out – it’s simple!
- Your twelve goals and primary habits (+ two bonus goals) go on the front
- Your vision goes on the back.
- The other 6 pages are for keeping track of progress month-by-month. Similar to the spreadsheet, check off the days that you feel you’re on-track to meet your goals. You’ll be able to, at a glance, see how your month is shaping up.

Note: The PocketMod is too small and, in my opinion, too inflexible to adequately track a fluid task list all year. So similar to the spreadsheet, you’ll need to use another tool like Microsoft Outlook, Things, ToodleDo, or Remember the Milk for tracking your individual tasks.

Other Tools

Here’s a list of tools I’ve used or am currently using – something here may come in handy for you:

Joe’s Goals (Online goal tracker, read my write-up)
Traineo (Online fitness tracker)
Pen & paper (Moleskine is my favorite)
ToodleDo (One of the best online task managers)
Remember the Milk (Also a top online task manager)
Things (Best Mac OS X task manager)
Microsoft Outlook 2007/2010 (Windows information manager; track goals as Notes, and tasks as Tasks)
OneNote 2007/2010 (Best Windows note-taking application)
Evernote (Great online notepad; what I use for everything)
Mint (Fantastic financial tracking and planning site)

You can find more self-tracking tools on The Quantified Self resource list. Here are some other sites you’ll find there potentially relevant to Twelve Goals:

Bedpost (Track how often you get busy – seriously)
Lifetick (Online goal tracking – a little complex but powerful)
Track Your Happiness (How do you really feel right now?)
LiveStrong (Dare to change your life)
Daytum (Collect and categorize personal data)
And more…

Finding the right tools may take a little trial and error. If you don’t find yourself adjusting well to a site or process in about 7-10 days, it might be worth trying something else. Like with most things, it’ll likely come down to a combination of a few different tools and not a single one that does it all for you – at least for now.

Ready for the Execution Phase

Planning is now officially finished! You have your vision, monthly goals, tasks and habits, and you have tools to use throughout the year to keep you focused. Now it’s time to execute.

Good luck on your journey and may you achieve all twelve of your goals this year!

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)

Mike Torres — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 00:16:07 +0000

Before starting with Step 3, you might first want to read the introduction, Step 1 & Step 2.

Breaking Down Each Goal

I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change. – Jim Rohn

Twelve Goals is an annual plan you create for yourself. A plan of inspiration, a plan of action, and a plan you can be accountable to.

By this point, you should have all twelve of your goals locked and loaded for the year. It’ll probably be frustrating then to hear that even though they’re 99.9% committed, they can still change throughout the year. How so? By identifying what it will take to actually achieve them given your circumstances.

In Step 2 you probably did a “squint test” or “t-shirt sized cost (i.e. Small, Medium, Large, X-Large) ” of feasibility. Meaning: if you squinted hard enough you could probably see how a particular goal could be achieved in the month you assigned it to. But guessing really isn’t good enough. Sometimes you don’t know just how much work needs to happen in order to get something accomplished, and it’s easy to get sidetracked or delayed by unforeseen events.

This step is all about figuring out what it’s going to take. It’s about getting real. But it’s also about being agile and adapting your plan throughout the year as conditions change.

In project management, the approach of breaking down a project into smaller work items is called a work breakdown structure (or a work backlog). As defined by Wikipedia, a work breakdown structure consists of "the end objective, successively subdividing it into manageable components in terms of size, duration, and responsibility which include all steps necessary to achieve the objective.”

In Twelve Goals parlance, this is identifying every task that needs to be checked off in order to accomplish your goal.

Sounds like a lot of work… and it can be. But spending the time now to squabble with yourself about what it takes to make something happen is better than fighting yourself when you’ve hit a wall halfway through your second month. There’s nothing more frustrating than assuming you know how to do something, just to find out you weren’t ready to begin with. In other words, this step above everything else is about being honest with yourself about where you are, what you need to do, and what needs to happen around your goal to make it achievable.

Preparation is key.

Defining a work breakdown structure for a complex project can be harder than coming up with a task list for a single goal, but the intent is the same. Your primary objective throughout this process is to learn. Learn everything you can about the thing you’re going to accomplish so you have all the ammunition you’ll need when you need it.

Remember: your future self is lazier than you are right now. Right now you have energy, you have positive intent, and you have that elusive feeling that you can conquer anything. Use this vigor for the next few hours to lay out your plan for the year. Because if you do it now, you’ll have something to refer to for the next twelve months. No excuses.

Ultimately, each goal should have a series of tasks associated with it up-front. Here are some recommendations for creating your task list for each goal:

Identify 100% of the work required for each goal as you see it today. Go goal-by-goal and break it down into a series of tasks. You need to identify 100% of the work as you see it right now. Don’t assume someone else will do it for you (including your future self – remember: that person is lazy!) Figure out exactly what needs to happen, in the right order, to accomplish what you’d like to accomplish.
Give each task a “day-I-will-complete-this” deadline within the month. I hate to call this a “due date” because that implies you should wait until that day to do anything with it. In reality, there are two dates for each task that are interesting: the day you think you’ll start, and the day you’ll think you’ll finish. Managing that can get tedious however, so for now, identify your completion date and balance it against all your other tasks such that the date is actually achievable.
Make your task outcome focused and action oriented. A task with a subject of “Chapter 1” isn’t outcome focused, and it’s not a task you can look to at a future date without prejudice. “Write 2000 words in 3 hours towards Chapter 1 of my novel” is something you can work towards. Assume that your future self is going to second guess your work, and is going to look for loopholes to get out of doing the work to begin with. Don’t give him or her any outs.
Estimate how long each task will take and scope each task appropriately. Think about this like planning any project – each task should be four hours or less – or even fewer if you don’t have four hour blocks to spend. Generally speaking, if something takes more than 4 hours, you need to find a way to make it smaller or it’ll be vague to know where to start, or too overwhelming to get started at all.
Make sure the total time doesn’t exceed the time you have to spend. If your monthly goal is to learn to play piano at an advanced level, you might find that the total time you have to spend towards your goal in a single month isn’t enough. This is where the idea of compounding goals is useful. Instead of trying to squeeze everything into a thirty day window, break up your goals across multiple months and each month, build on the month before. You’ll find that being realistic during the planning phase will keep you from setting yourself up to fail throughout the year.
Call out any dependent tasks. Some tasks will have dependencies on others being complete – or on something you’re expecting from someone else. It’s important that you track this just as you would any other "waiting for" item so you are actively managing the things you need to get started prior to the start of the month.

And finally, the most important thing to keep in mind throughout the year:

Revisit your tasks for the next month prior to the 1st of that month. This is where that agility comes into play. If you were identifying everything you needed to do all year in December of the previous year and you didn’t have any flexibility in the process, you’d probably find that you aren’t as omniscient as you had hoped. By using the planning phase to get everything out of your brain for each monthly goal, you’re doing yourself a service that will help you when that month comes around. But the task list you’ll have at the start of that month will likely vary depending on prior successes and/or failures, by your current life circumstances, or by something as trivial as the weather or the amount of time you can spend on it. This is why allowing yourself some flexibility to adjust your tasks throughout the year is key.

For example, in order to lose 5 pounds in February, you might have a task list that looks something like this:

Sign-up for online fitness tracking at www.traineo.com (by 2/1)
Download grocery list from Men’s Health (by 2/1)
Enroll in 24 Hour Fitness – setup automated billing (by 2/2)
Add morning workouts to my calendar (by 2/3)
Buy a digital scale that can track bodyfat (by 2/7)

And a few days before the end of January, you’d take a look at the task list again and determine if anything about it needs to change before you start.

Identifying One Habit to Change Each Month

As I wrote in 15 Ways To Get a Habit To Stick Forever,”habits are the single most important ingredient to achieving real focus and real growth.” This is proven in day-to-day life constantly, and habits have been shown in recent research to be vital to personal development. Habits simply aren’t something you can ignore or put off if you want to make lasting change and significant progress toward your goals.

Here’s how we’ll approach identifying habits. The first thing to do is to identify your “master habit” – the one thing you do that helps get you back on track with everything else (for me it’s daily exercise). In Your Master Habit: Get One Thing Clicking, Watch Others Follow I’ve outlined four recommendations for finding and then implementing your master habit. Remember that self-regulation builds on itself, and if you’re able to make progress with just one thing, you’ll find that you’ll end up making progress across the board.

Once you have your master habit identified, for each goal, you’ll need to identify the habits you’ll need to change or adopt in order to make achieving your goal possible. As with anything else, it’s important not to go overboard with this and try to change too many things at once. So for now just make a list of habits for each goal.

For example, for our goal of losing 5 pounds in February, here are some habits you may write-down:

Wake-up daily at 6am
Get to the gym or run outside 4x weekly
Sleep at least seven hours each night
Always pack my gym bag the night before
Go grocery shopping every Saturday
Plan and cook my weekly meals on Sunday

And so on…

Each habit in the list may be important, but because of the propensity to try and do too much (we are human, after all) I’d recommend having no more than twelve total habit changes for the year, or one for each month. If each of your goals requires habit changes that exceed your capacity for change then it’s likely that your goals are a little too ambitious and may need some tweaking.

This means boiling down your list of habits for each goal to a single “primary” habit, that when combined with your master habit makes the biggest positive difference to your month. Remember: throughout the year, take it one step at a time and make sure you’re cementing the change, not just going through the motions.

So for our goal of losing 5 pounds in February, you might identify the following habit as the single most important one for you.

Primary Habit: Wake-up daily at 6am after at least seven hours of sleep each night

This doesn’t mean the other habits you’ve identified aren’t important, but this primary habit you’ve identified should have the highest chance of helping you achieve your goal.

Tip: Leo of Zen Habits has a great new site focused on picking six habits to change which complements Twelve Goals pretty well, check it out: www.6changes.com.

Monthly Planning Rhythm

At the start of the year, you’ll have your vision, your twelve monthly goals, your per-goal task list, your master habit, and your twelve monthly primary habits identified and written down. This is your plan.

Before the start of each month, you’ll do a check-in to validate your goal for that month and the corresponding task list and primary habit you identified at the start of the year. If the plan needs tweaking, you’ll adjust your monthly plan.

Here’s what this rhythm looks like (below). Again, remember, this is supposed to be fun! You’re making choices that will define yourself for decades to come. Just as compounding monthly goals helps you make more progress in a year, compounding your goals year over year means you’ll be an unstoppable machine.

Checking It Off

The final step is simple. It involves keeping yourself honest throughout the year

I’ve found that the best plans fall apart pretty quickly without accountability. Accountability to yourself can be a tricky thing to simulate in order to benefit from this process, but there are trivial ways to keep yourself moving forward.

First off, I’ve found that daily progress tracking is more effective than weekly or monthly. This is because tracking, in itself, is a habit that benefits from consistency. The more you read and affirm your goals and habits, the more likely you are to be elated with progress, and disappointed with failure.

Instead of tracking everything every single day, I’ve also found that a single yes/no indicator each day is powerful yet easy enough to be effective. This means that each day, probably at the end of the day, you’ll read your monthly goal, primary habit, and tasks for that month and check off that day if you feel you’ve been true to the spirit of the goal and made ~1/30th progress towards achieving it.

The key is to have as many checkboxes each month as you can – though striving for perfection (going 30 for 30) isn’t something you should worry about. Read 11 Reasons Why Perfection is Overrated! if you struggle with this. If you miss a day, or a few days in a row, just look at each new day as a chance to start fresh.

Tracking is easy and there are a number of ways to do this that we’ll cover in the next post on Tools. For now, here’s what your month could look like (courtesy of Don’t Break the Chain – red equates to a “check” – a day that you’ve identified as positive progress):

Almost Finished!

You’ve come a long way if you’ve gotten this far. In fact, you’ve already come further than 99.999% of the people in the world in terms of actively choosing who you want to be and how you’re going to contribute. If you’ve been following step-by-step, you now have everything you need for the next year. The final post in the series will be about software, websites, and/or things you can use in the real world to help out along the way.

Good luck! And please do let me know if this series has been helpful in any way.

Continue to: Tools You Can Use ->

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

12 Goals: Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2)

Mike Torres — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:20:45 +0000

Before starting with Step 2, you might first want to read the introduction and Step 1.

Getting Ready

You have your vision. Now it’s time to formulate (and document) your monthly goals for the coming year. While this may sound easy or even uninspiring, it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s hard and it will take more time than you think. But that time is well spent, both in terms of the outcome (a set of clear goals to work against) as well as the inspiration it can immediately provide.

Remember, goals help form the building blocks for positive emotions and subjective happiness with life. So while there’s obvious benefit in having goals soley as virtual signposts for achievement, there’s also a residual sort of “under the covers” benefit of enhanced well-being – a deep well-being that can be long-lasting. If you’re setting, working towards, and achieving goals you’re more likely to find flow regularly.

Now, it can be pretty difficult to sit and write up your twelve goals in twelve minutes and be finished. You should be prepared to take your time, ensuring that the goals you’re creating are the “right” goals for this time in your life given all your circumstances. I generally take a phased approach and assume my goals are going to be in flux for a couple months before I lock on my annual plan.

Here’s one way you can do this:

A few months in advance of your new year, start keeping a running list of potential goals in a notebook. Have some targeted brainstorm sessions where you generate your “300% list” – or all the things you could accomplish in the next year if you have to the time. If you haven’t been doing this already for the next year, you can certainly catch-up with a little extra legwork provided you’re focused on it.
A few weeks in advance of your new year (for 2010, this is now), you’re going to want to “get real” with this list, validating your current goal list with your vision and their feasibility. This means getting your total goal count down to twelve, one for each month of the year.
If there’s a particular goal or two that you’re anxious about, it can be useful to “try before you buy” for a few weeks. In other words, give the goal a shot prior to committing to it for next year. This is particularly useful for goals that involve a fundamental change in your schedule (i.e. a 5pm biking class a few miles from your office) since they can be the first ones to go.

Assuming you currently have a blank slate, let’s get going.

Starting with Virtues, Categories, and Attributes

Before getting started on documenting your exact goals for the year, one thing you should do is revisit your vision. Your goals should flow from the ultimate vision you have for yourself, so if you need to modify your vision before you start, you should. Your vision should be accurate and speak to who you are right now, not who you were a month or a year ago.

Once your vision is up-to-date, grab a pen & paper (or a keyboard & mouse) and start with the “ultimate brainstorm”, taking as long as you need to exhaust your mind of all possibilities for the year. This is how you’ll generate your 300% list. Again, it may be best to do this in several sessions a few months in advance, but you should be confident that you can start this at any time. Realize that this isn’t your list of goals, this is your list of possible goals to choose from. Because it’s not yet “real”, don’t constrain yourself at all – the sky’s the limit!

If you’re having trouble getting started, I’ve found that starting with virtues, categories, and finally attributes can be helpful.

A virtue is an “admirable quality” you aspire to have – so if you look at virtues and consider what it’ll take to improve upon them, you may be able to generate a set of meaningful goals.

Here are ten virtues I’ve found helpful over the years (not coincidentally they roughly map to categories on Refocuser):

Courageous. Overcoming fear and “false expectations appearing real”.
Present. The right time-perspective; focusing on the present over past/future most of the time.
Active. Strength training, cardio, yoga, or any other thing to get your heart beating regularly.
Efficient. Making the most of your time each and every day; focusing on important things.
Nourished. Keeping your body and mind fueled with the best food, vitamins, and supplements.
Alert. Prioritizing sleep, meditation, active rest, and downtime.
Determined. Being goal-oriented and focused on constant improvement.
Connected. Spending time with the people that matter most to you.
Purposeful. Living a meaningful life; working towards something bigger than yourself
Positive. Banishing negative thought; finding the light in every thing and every one.

Once you’ve exhausted all virtues, it’s time to level-up and look at broad categories of goals. Each person will have a different approach to each category, and people may interpret what they mean in vastly different ways. But they’re all important – it should be difficult to look at the following categories without coming up with a bunch of potential goals!

Here are seven categories to explore:

Mind. Learning, teaching, and challenging yourself intellectually.
Body. Exercise, nutrition, supplementation, and generally being active.
Family and Friends. Fostering and growing your most important relationships.
Spiritual. Religious and/or spiritual needs; how you connect to the source.
Professional. Making a living; progressing or advancing at your pace.
Financial. Savings, earnings, investments (tip: what you have, not what you make).
Hobbies and Passions. Making time for personal things that help you feel alive.

Once you’ve worked through virtues and categories, it’s time to move on to attributes. These are traits that each of your goals should have in order to be effective. This list of twelve attributes has been cross-posted from 12 Ways to Make Your Goals Smarter, one of the first posts related to the Twelve Goals concept on Refocuser.

Here are twelve attributes you can use to refine the effectiveness of your goals:

Holistic. Each goal must fit like a puzzle piece with all other goals. If your goals aren’t holistically aligned, you’ll quickly find that you’re working in conflict with yourself. As an example, if one of your goals is to spend more time with your family, and another is to start a business in another state, you’ll find yourself at odds. Your goals need to work together or the whole thing could go up in smoke.
Value driven. Your goals need to speak to who you are at the core. This means you need to know yourself and understand what drives you. For example, if you’re someone who lives to spend time with your grandchildren, it’s important that your goals reflect that joy. If your goals reflected someone else’s values or society’s at large (material wealth based on social comparison) and not your own, you may find yourself chasing down the wrong thing at the expense of what really makes you tick.
Personal. Are you someone who likes to spend the majority of time with lots of other people, or do you like to spend your time alone or with a small close-knit group? Are you someone who likes things to be predictable or someone who thrives on chaos? These aren’t small considerations when it comes to setting goals. You want to make sure you know under which circumstances you’ll thrive best, otherwise you’ll end up with a goal you don’t even want to look at. One fun evaluation of this is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – derive goals from your personality type and have a better shot at success.
Fresh. Setting goals is not something rigid and unbending, it’s actually a very fluid process. If you’re only setting goals every few years, and only looking at them annually, there’s a pretty good chance your goals don’t align with your current reality. That’s a sure way to ignore them. Instead, your goals need to be fresh and adjusted on a semi-regular basis. My own timeframe is annually – with monthly check-ins and readjustments. What’s yours?
Scoped. Only you know how many goals you should have in order to feel balanced. Too many goals and you can become crushed by the weight of them. Too few and you’re failing to realize your full potential. This may take some adjustment, and it may take years to find the right rhythm, but sooner or later you’ll find the scope of goals most appropriate for you. I’ve had as few as five and as many as twenty for the year – each year is also somewhat different depending on the variables at play. [Note: In the context of the Twelve Goals program, your goals should be big enough and small enough. An individual goal shouldn't be something you can do in an hour - that's a task - but if it takes you 2 years, it's too big for this program. We're scoping goals to months, not hours or years.]
Habit forming. Goals that are habit forming are far more powerful than goals that are solely about the outcome. For instance, if you’d like to get a 5% pay increase, the best way to make that happen is to break down your behavior and get the right habits in place to enact positive change. Don’t focus on the increase in pay, that’s just a byproduct of the success you’ve created. The increase in pay may (or may not be) an indirect result, but the more lasting and important change is in your day-to-day approach. Habits are the building blocks of goals.
Present tense. “By February, I’d like to buy my first home” isn’t a present tense goal. “I’m a homeowner and have found and purchased my first home” is. Trick yourself into believing you’ve already accomplished your goal. By reaffirming this with yourself with each review, you’ll find that your goals come more easily. I’m not talking about some mystical “Law of Attraction” – I’m talking about proactive reinforcement and implicit influence of your self.
Positive. Studies have shown that people are more apt to achieve “approach” goals vs. “avoidance” goals, so your goals should be positive in nature. In other words, make your goals about enablement and the things you’re going to do, not the things you don’t want to do. If you want to quit smoking, you want your goal to be about improving your health or setting the right example for your children – not constantly calling attention to the thing you’re depriving yourself of. “Stop taking daily cigarette breaks” is tough to rally behind, but “Improve my health and overall well-being and show my kids how to live a healthy life” is motivating.
Challenge/skill balanced. Sound familiar? That’s right – this is a core component of Flow. You want to have a goal that take you closer to the Flow state and not goals that make you bored, overwhelmed, or otherwise apathetic. The key is to find the right balance between the challenge involved, and the skill you’re developing to address that challenge. From Csikszentmihalyi’s Wikipedia entry: “If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. Both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, then apathy results.”
Want-to. A goal can quickly degrade to perceived work if it feels like an imperative. Yes, there are things you have to do in life, but your goals – in order to really work – have to be things you actually want to do. The process of setting your goals alone can open your eyes to how many things you do on a regular basis that aren’t things you actually want to do. And even if some of your goals are have-to goals, you should figure out how best to phrase them as want-to goals. For example, you have to go to work in order to get paid. But you want to close 10 sales/week in order to be at the top of the sales force for the year. And if you don’t want it at all, maybe it’s time to pull out your copy of What Color is Your Parachute and change something bigger.
Lasting. Goals that are subject to hedonic adaptation aren’t lasting enough to focus on, while goals that have long-term value can make a serious positive difference in your life. For example, buying a brand new $50,000 car may be a great goal – but research has shown that after some time (shorter than most of us think) we adapt to changes in our circumstances, returning our level of happiness back to where it started. The best goals are the ones that compound on themselves – similar to compound interest in your retirement account – and “keep on giving” long after they’ve been accomplished. For instance, learning a new language or skill, spending time with friends and family, or organizing your life are all more impactful long-term than buying a new gadget (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with buying gadgets!).
Shared. Most of us aren’t an island – we have life partners, spouses, kids, close friends, pets, and imaginary friends. While it may seem that goal-setting is an isolated experience, it shouldn’t be. The things you decide to commit yourself to are, in some cases, just as important to the people around you as they are to you. And (to speak in project management terms): you need to get buy-in from the stakeholders before making any commitment.

Picking Twelve!

Now it’s time to “narrow the funnel”, taking your 300% list and whittling it down to just twelve, one for each month of the year. This is going to be challenging, primarily because you’ll feel like you should keep them all on the list even though you know it’s not possible to actually achieve them all.

But without focus, this whole process falls apart!

Cutting goals can be the hardest part of this entire program. This is partially due to the fact that since you’ve already written the goal down, some part of your consciousness has already pre-committed to it. Breaking up with your most cherished goals can be hard to do, but in order to make progress against the most important goals, you need to focus on twelve goals and twelve only.

In order to go from 300% (everything you could possibly do) to twelve (the things you will do), try asking yourself these questions:

On a scale of 1-10, how badly do I want to achieve this goal?
On a scale of 1-10, how achievable is this goal this year?
In order to achieve this goal, do I need to achieve other goals first?
How much will my life change if I achieve this goal?
How much will my life change if I don’t achieve this goal?
Can these goals be compounded on top of each other to lead to something bigger?
Which categories and virtues are most important this year?
Does this goal meet all twelve attributes?

The answers to each question should be able to narrow the funnel further in your quest to get to the “final twelve”. Keep iterating through the questions until you’re able to make the hard trade-offs; choosing specific goals to keep and jettisoning the rest to oblivion. Or, maybe just to next year

Tip: For the goals you postpone to future years, it’s still helpful to keep them in a list that you can refer to, and even add to over time. This approach is similar to the Someday/Maybe list in Getting Things Done. It can be curative just to know that you’re not “losing” all of your aspirations, you’re just purposely ignoring them for the time being. The idea that they could come back in future years can relax your mind for now and help you focus on the ones you’ve decided to commit to.

Making Goals Visual

Once you have your twelve goals, we’re going to put the icing on the cake with imagery for each goal. Imagery has been shown to be more effective than words alone in terms of getting something to “stick” in your mind, so it goes without saying then that using it for your goals is critical.

Imagery can help awake hidden emotions and unlock feelings about your goals – and more practically, it makes it easier to quickly review and affirm your goals throughout the year.

What does this mean? This means you need to pick imagery that reminds you of the goal at a glance. Find imagery that’s both inspiring and meaningful. And similar to the goals themselves, make sure the imagery isn’t reinforcing a negative (i.e. a picture of a homeless shelter as an indicator of what could happen!) but instead is reinforcing a positive.

Here are some places to look for good goal images:

Putting it Together

Now that you have your twelve goals and your imagery, you can place them in a basic table, imagery and all. This table may be in a notebook or in an Excel document; it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have it and that’s it available when you need it.

January	I’ve lost 5 pounds on the scale
February	I’ve learned how to use my new camera + took 1000 test pictures
March	I have $2,000 in my Savings account

…

Always have your goals readily available. You could paste them to your bathroom mirror, keep them on your bedside table, or make them your computer’s wallpaper. I keep mine in an Evernote notebook that’s available on all of my computers and from my mobile phone.

Congratulations for getting this far! Creating your monthly goals is step 2. Continue to: Define and Track your Habits & Tasks (Step 3) ->

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

12 Goals: Create Your Vision (Step 1)

Mike Torres — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:25:38 +0000

Before starting with Step 1, you might first want to read the introduction.

Beginning at the End

“Writing or reviewing a mission statement changes you because it forces you to think through your priorities deeply, carefully, and to align your behavior with your beliefs” – Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

One of the underlying principles of 12 Goals is to “begin with the end in mind”, similar to what Stephen Covey proposes in his books. This is a key tenet of any planning process, and is absolutely essential to do as a first step on the path to achieving your goals. When you think about anything you’ve ever accomplished in your life – from remodeling your kitchen to getting a new job – you probably had some level of vision about what you wanted the outcome of your process to be. It may have taken a little while to get a handle on what that vision really was, but somewhere deep down you knew it was there. You probably didn’t just wake up one day, make a phone call, and land a job that afternoon. You likely spent time and energy defining your end result. Beginning at the end is about figuring out what the ideal end result is, writing it down, and then working backwards from there.

Think about creating your vision (or personal mission statement as some call it) as being explicit about what you want your life to be about, and through the process, learning more about what you want your year to be about. Your next year should be a very deliberate step in the right direction – and it’s awfully hard to do that unless you know where you’re going.

An example of vision creation “beginning at the end” that I like to give relates to software development at a large company. In certain divisions of Microsoft, a thoughtful planning process takes place prior to the start of any major release. It’s during this time that the team works to formulate the game plan by looking at market research, doing deep competitive analyses, brainstorming about potential breakthrough ideas, and so on.

One of the outputs of this process is a mock press release or blog entry, post-dated around the time the team expects the software to be released to the world, describing in detail (in present tense, of course) what the “story” for the release is going to be. Frequently the team will also go into depth about what they expect the press, bloggers, and enthusiastic users to say about the release as well as a means to better describe the vision.

Imagine that: describing in advance what you’re working towards – months, and in many cases, years before you’re ready to announce it to the world. And before you’ve even started any of the “real” work on the project (in this case, writing code). This particular document has a few immediate effects on the team. First, it clarifies for them and their management what they’re committing to (and by extension, what they aren’t) so they can focus on the things that matter the most. Secondly, it always, without a doubt, excites the people on the team to see the potential impact of the thing they’re working on!

There’s no better way to ensure the members of an organization have similar goals than to write down the vision first; goals should always flow from vision. While this process isn’t the same as creating a personal vision, it’s remarkably similar in terms of its intent. Our main objective with our envisioning process is to make sure our monthly goals flow from the ultimate vision we have for ourselves.

Creating Your Vision

Now onto the fun part: creating your own personal vision. Your vision might be a single sentence, a few pages of written prose, or a bulleted list. Ultimately the format isn’t important – it should be in a format that resonates the most with you. It may even change from time to time as you get more comfortable with it. You might start with a paragraph, migrate to a bulleted list, and end up with a combination of both. So long as it’s serving its purpose – which is to inspire and focus you – it’s probably fine.

Important note: Even though 12 Goals is a year-long process, your vision isn’t. How you view yourself and how you’d like to grow over time shouldn’t have a time limit or a deadline. Think about your vision as “above” your goals.

Setting out to create your vision can be intimidating. Heck, writing is intimidating no matter what it is you’re writing. Just keep in mind that you are the only consumer of this document (for now) and perfection isn’t required. What’s most important is that you start with something. As any writer will tell you, it’s a lot harder to edit a blank page than a poorly written draft. Ultimately this process should be fun. I get a real kick out of thinking about, and putting to paper, how I view myself in relation to the universe now and in the future. It’s nothing if not clarifying.

So let’s get started. I’d recommend freeform writing at first, which means just let your pencil or keyboard work for as long as you can. Spend at least 15 or 20 minutes jotting down whatever comes to mind as you think of it. Don’t spend any time correcting your writing or going back and adding punctuation – there will be time for that. Just write. If you feel like it helps, start putting things into the format that helps you best describe your vision – for me it’s a set of bullets or an outline, but for others it may be keywords, phrases, or memorable quotes.

Realize that whatever you write can always be changed later. It’s not permanent, nor is there a time limit on the process. Clarifying your vision may take multiple sessions over a couple months, or you could be satisfied after just a few minutes. The most important thing is to start with something.

Here are some things you can do to get started creating your own vision:

Define your top three focus areas. Your vision should be a result of the most important things to you (for me it’s family, career, and personal development). Think about the various things you want to be known for and make sure those things are represented in your vision.
Identify your core values and incorporate the five most important into your vision. Examples might include integrity, dedication, enjoyment, efficiency, empathy, courage, wisdom, friendliness, flexibility, strength, focus, improvement, balance, or honesty. A quick Internet search yields many more for you to consider.
Consider the roles you play. Each of us serves various roles everyday: parent, teacher, businessperson, babysitter, manager, employee, and so on. Make sure your vision addresses each role that’s important to you.
Think about your personal heroes. What characteristics or values do they have that you admire? What are they best known for and how does that relate to what you’d like to be known for?
Answer these four questions in order to learn more about yourself and who you want to be.
1. What am I here for (Purpose)?
2. Who am I really (Values)?
3. How do I live that Purpose and those Values every day?
4. How do I translate that Purpose and those Values into a successful year?

Over the years, I’ve found that the best personal vision documents have had the following attributes in common. While you don’t need to address each and every one, look at your vision and see how these seven attributes describe it.

Written down. There’s little use in coming up with a vision if you can’t remember it or pull it up when you need it. Writing it down (or typing it up as I do) is more important than any other attribute. Research has shown that writing things down helps us remember them.
Uniquely you. When your read your vision, you should deeply identify with it. Your vision shouldn’t reflect anyone else’s vision for your life but your own. Your values, your ambitions, and your dreams should be encapsulated by your vision.
Holistic. Your vision needs to incorporate all aspects of your life that are important to you. If it’s only about your business, it’s not going to be personal enough. Make sure to call out everything that’s important to you.
Uplifting. Keep your vision positive and you’ll be more inclined to refer back to it. The more you refer back to it, the more you reinforce it. Reading your vision should be inspiring, not something you avoid.
Birds-eye view. Your vision shouldn’t be too specific. It needs to be something that’s above the fray, taking a top-down look at your life. Your vision isn’t your goals, and neither of them are your to-do list. Your vision is high-level.
Simple. Or at least as simple and short as you need it to be. If it takes you thirty minutes to read your own vision document, it’s not something you’ll do very often. Keep it short and sweet to be most effective.
Available. Your vision doesn’t do much good if you don’t read it! One thing you could do is carry a printed version of your personal vision around in your wallet or purse. I have a digital version stored on my phone so I can refer to it regularly.

Remember: format and length don’t matter at all so long as it’s your vision, it’s simple and uplifting, and you have it with you when you want to read it.

Sample Vision Statements

Here are some sample personal mission/vision statements from around the web. Note how they’re all different formats and structure, yet all are unique to that individual.

Gandhi: “Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day: I shall not fear anyone on Earth. I shall fear only God. I shall not bear ill will toward anyone. I shall not submit to injustice from anyone. I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.”

Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues:

TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children… to leave the world a better place… to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

Walt Disney: “Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.”

Mike Torres (mine ): I suppose now’s a good time to laugh about “which of these doesn’t belong” since putting my name next to Ben Franklin and Gandhi is pretty ridiculous. But I figured why not show you what I wrote down for myself. My own vision document started in 1999 as a paragraph or so and has evolved since. I recently added happiness commandments to it so I make sure to read them. Here is my vision.

What’s Next?

By now you should be ready to start documenting your own personal vision. Using some of the recommendations in this post, you can set out to really craft a vision for yourself, which will make the next step in 12 Goals easier – and set you up for greater success. Remember: if you don’t have a vision for yourself, you’re like a boat without a rudder. You’ll end up going wherever the wind takes you. It’s a lot more fun to be in control of your destiny than it is to be an actor in someone else’s play.

Creating your vision is step 1. Continue to Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2) ->

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

12 Goals: One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)

Mike Torres — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:20:56 +0000

The Idea

“What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve” – Malcolm Gladwell

Setting goals is hard. Achieving them is even harder. Over the last decade, I’ve come to realize just how few people have any idea about what they want their life to be. The majority of people take things day-by-day without a clear roadmap or direction. Unfortunately this type of approach only works when you have an extreme amount of luck or an otherworldly amount of talent on your side. Most people need a little more structure to their approach.

The big question: where do you start? Some people jump right in after reading a personal development book and start thinking about their goals. They work on this list for a few days, but without a blueprint for success, they eventually give up and fall back into their previous habits. Habits that haven’t been able to generate the level of success they’re looking for. The "ah-ha" moment for me came when thinking about what it is about the goals people set that has them giving up so quickly?

This led me to a simple conclusion. Goals that are too big, too grand, simply don’t work. Yet in order to qualify as a life goal, the goal by its very nature has to be big – otherwise it’s just a to-do item on a sticky note. So where does that leave us? Well, right in the middle! Goals that are scoped to approximately 30 days have an innate sense of urgency, yet there’s enough “runway” to achieve something pretty big. When you break things down into 30 day milestones, you also have the benefit of being able to build on successes from month to month – you know that by April you will have achieved your January, February, and March goals, so you can make your April goal something that moves you that much further in the same direction. Compounding success like this is quite powerful.

With this 30-day goal idea, I started searching through my research to see how I could group various concepts together to make Twelve Goals a more structured program. The notion of 30-day goals is a start, but it certainly in and of itself isn’t enough to get people up off the couch. That requires a little more. After a few weeks of dissecting the data I’ve been collecting, I settled on a high-level structure that can serve as a basic template for people. But more on that in a minute…

Why Set Goals At All?

Because they work.

Setting and working towards goals has many benefits. In recent years, there have been studies linking goal-setting with an enhanced state of well-being; a feeling of purpose and happiness that’s unique to people who set and strive for something meaningful and important to them. Goals that align with our needs, values, and identities are the types of goals that work best as they’re able to speak to who we really are. People with this type of forward momentum exude positive energy and are able to better adjust to life’s ups and downs than those who are mindlessly wandering through their days.

It’s no secret that people who set goals are also more likely to achieve them. Yet while people are diligent about setting goals at the workplace as part of standard practice, few take the time to focus on their lives outside of the office. Naturally people who achieve their goals are more likely to be able to repeat the process with less mental overhead, reinforcing that positive state of well-being. Researchers have referred to this as a happiness spiral. Not a bad spiral to be stuck in, huh?

Goals are also refocusers. Sure, it’s not a word that any dictionary recognizes, but it’s a very real concept as anyone who has ever been “off track” knows. Goals have a very real ability to straighten us out during times of confusion or unhappiness by reminding us about who we are and what we need to do. If you’re able to refer back to something tangible that describes to you what’s really important, chances are greater that you’ll saddle up, refocus, and make it so.

If you’re down on goal setting, you might want to stop here and check out Does Goal Setting Hold Us Back? before continuing. If you’re back and you’re still down on goal setting, you still might want to read on and see if anything in the program resonates with you.

The Template

Twelve Goals is based on the following basic equation:

Achievement = Vision * (Monthly Goals * (Positive Habits + Specific Tasks + Daily Monitoring))

This formula is as simple as I could make it. Any simpler and it would lose its punch. What this says is that the combination of positive habits, specific tasks, and daily progress monitoring will really magnify your goals. When combined with the right, appropriate vision for yourself, achievement is… well, achievable! Here’s the primer (we’ll get deeper into each element over the next 60 days and I’ll come back and hyperlink each section).

Vision is what you use for inspiration and aspiration. It’s the equivalent of the corporate mission statement. The idea with a vision is to "begin with the end in mind". For example, a trick we use at Microsoft is to write a press release before we begin developing the software so that when the time comes to make trade-offs, we know what our ultimate goal is. Not much can be achieved without a vision, so it all starts here. And of course, it’s not just thought about, it’s written down.

Monthly goals are your commitments for the year. These monthly goals serve as the backbone for the entire Twelve Goals program. Naturally it’s important that when deciding what your monthly goals should be, you look further than the traditional SMART model. My recommendation is to use the list from 12 Ways to Make Your Goals Smarter when formulating your goals (holistic, value driven, personal, fresh, scoped, habit forming, present tense, positive, challenge/skill balanced, want-to, lasting, and shared). Another aspect of goal setting that we’ll go into is the use of imagery, which when combined with words can help reinforce your goals.

Positive habits could be the most overlooked aspect of any goal-setting program, but it’s front and center in Twelve Goals. For good reason too: without forming the appropriate habits, there’s no way to really achieve any level of sustained success. Naturally the word sustained is the key word here. There’s a big difference between the “one trick pony” kind of achievement that anyone could reach with a sprint of short-term activity, but what we’re looking to form is the basis for the achievement marathon. Because similar to compounded interest in an investment account, the real fun comes from compounded success over time. We’ll be using the 15-point list from 15 Ways to Get a New Habit to Stick Forever (by far the most popular post on Refocuser with thousands of views, dozens of tweets, and lots of discussion!)

Specific tasks are the constructs by which you break your goals into manageable, actionable, and concrete pieces. With the 30-day window for each goal, we’ll be looking at each month as a milestone within the greater 12-month cycle, and before each month begins we’ll take some time to break that month’s goals into tasks. If you’re aware of systems like Getting Things Done, this part of the program will likely be pretty familiar to you. These are the micro-goals you’ll need in order to move forward, step-by-step.

Daily monitoring, the last piece of the puzzle, relates to the way we monitor progress and make ongoing adjustments as needed. This is another oft-overlooked but important component, particularly when things haven’t become habitual yet. There’s no quicker way than to tell when you’re off-track than to examine your progress on a day-to-day basis. Of course, in order for this to work, monitoring has to be a habit in and of itself – and it can’t be something that you dread doing. And of course, it can’t take more than 30 seconds to do it. When we cover daily monitoring, a spreadsheet and PDF download will be made available for you to use.

What’s Next?

Continue to Create Your Vision (Step 1) ->

You can find all the Twelve Goals posts by clicking on the 12 Goals tag, subscribing to the RSS feed or email updates, or by following Refocuser on Twitter.

Form Positive New Habits Through Active Association

Mike Torres — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:56:27 +0000

It’s probably no surprise that repetition influences the formation of new habits. The time and way you brush your teeth probably doesn’t vary much night to night; it’s habitual. Each night at 10:30pm (give or take a few hours) you probably grab that toothbrush, squeeze some toothpaste onto it, and go about your violent brushing ritual. I can almost guarantee you don’t alternate quadrants of your mouth each night (unless you’re just a little insane) because it’s probably not something you think about anymore. You just do it, and you’ll probably always do it that way unless you make a conscious change.

Do something enough times and it becomes a part of you – perhaps to a fault – and from that point on, it can be harder not to do something at all than to do it. In truth, most of our lives consist of habitual action each day. Have you ever been driving along and realized (too late) that you’ve gone in the completely wrong direction, because you habitually started driving to work even though you were originally planning to go to a friend’s house? Your conscious mind shut-off the second you got into that car and was on auto-pilot until you realized you were heading in the wrong direction. I don’t know anyone that hasn’t happened to.

Forming positive new habits (and replacing negative old ones) is the only foolproof path to achievement there is. Your habits “accumulate up” to your goals – there can’t be real triumph without small wins along the way. You don’t just wake up one day as the president of your company, or as someone who exudes positive energy and contentment, without taking individual small steps to get there. This is the subtlety that’s lost on those people we all know who insist that good things don’t happen to them; not everyone realizes that it’s not just handed to you

One interesting thing about habit forming is that recent research has shown that each time you repeat a behavior, the context in which it occurs is linked in your mind to the activity itself. Context in this example refers to the things happening around the activity – the time of day, the music that’s playing, whether you’re in your car or sitting in your favorite chair, and so on. As explained by psychologist Wendy Wood and her team in Changing Circumstances, Disrupting Habits, an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “habit associations are represented in learning and memory systems separately from intentions, or decisions to achieve particular outcomes. Thus, walking into a dark room can trigger reaching for the light switch without any decision to do so.”

In other words, habits benefit from having similar context in order to be successfully maintained. At first, people start with an explicit intent to change some aspect of their life. As an obvious example, someone might have a goal to lose 15 pounds prior to their wedding day. This eventually translates into action (if this person is serious about the goal), and most times this action is ongoing (daily or close to it). With this repetition, associations are formed between the context of the action and the action itself. Eventually, these cues can help trigger automatic repetition of the activity and the original goal itself is used less in terms of personal motivation.

It becomes more about just being “what you do when you do it” than about doing something solely based on reason. You become like a computer executing a program step-by-step without much in the way of decision-making.

There are ways to form this active association between context and habits as a shortcut to form positive habits. Here’s the idea: surround the habit you’d like to form with corresponding positive context, forever linking your new habit with an environment or situation you enjoy. You may need to experiment a bit with this a bit to determine which things help the most (for me it’s music and scents). Here are some examples from my life:

In order to get into the habit of writing, I combine classical music and the smell of (good) espresso – now whenever I hear the music no matter where I am, I’m immediately ready to pour my heart out with a keyboard.
Getting into the habit of going to the gym early in the morning years ago required a daily ritual of Rocky music as soon as I got out of bed. To this day every time I hear Burning Heart from Rocky IV I’m ready to exercise.
And as odd as this is, in order to get into the habit of flossing every night, I first had to reorganize my bathroom. Seeing that the bathroom is organized how I like it as soon as I walk in reminds me that I need to floss!

The key to doing this is to combine something you already enjoy with a developing habit that isn’t yet second-nature. The association between the two can be enough to ingrain that habit a little more quickly.

Give it a try! The importance of the things happening around your behavior, positive or negative, is something that isn’t always recognized by people – but it’s important. In order to switch your behavior from manual to auto-pilot more quickly, associate happiness-inducing experiences with your new habit until it becomes something you do instinctively.

12 Ways to Make Your Goals Smarter

Mike Torres — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:03:00 +0000

When you search the interwebs for information on goal setting, you find a lot of the same recycled drivel. “Make your goals inspirational” and “Break your goals down into tasks” are common recommendations, but the single biggest bit of repeat advice is to make your goals SMART.

This acronym is one of the most overused in all of personal development, and doesn’t capture the essence of goal-setting. Not because it’s necessarily bad advice, but rather because it isn’t personal and authentic advice. It’s cookie cutter… and is more about task management than achievement.

To recap the SMART designation, the general thinking is that any goal that doesn’t meet the following attributes is a goal not worth having.

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Realistic (or Relevant)
T = Time-bound (or Timely)

Specific is about making sure your goal isn’t too vague, but instead represents exactly what you plan to accomplish, why you want to accomplish it, and how you’re going to do it. Measurable makes sure you can actually see and celebrate progress against the goal in order to move in the right direction through quantitative means. Attainable goals are goals you can actually achieve in the timeframe allotted – i.e. having a goal to make $10 million dollars in 1 week would be an unattainable goal for most people. Realistic refers to having a goal that you’re both willing and able to achieve. Time-bound (or Timely) is all about making sure you have an end-date in mind to hold yourself accountable to; a goal to become President of your company isn’t really a goal unless you set a date by which you’d like to accomplish it.

Sounds great, right? Sure, maybe if you’re a Cylon. For the rest of us, SMART doesn’t give us a solid enough framework to set personal goals. The SMART methodology is believed to have started in corporate America, and was originally used for commitment setting in the new practice of management in the 1950s. It’s intended mostly, to this day, for project management and not for real-world use. Perhaps this is why it seems so “big company” and not very relevant to the uniqueness and quirkiness that is human nature. Sure, you want your goals to be SMART, but don’t you need them to be more than that?

We need a new way to think about goals. A new framework for forming them, and a different way to think about evaluating them once they’re set.

I first starting formal goal setting in 2000, although I do recall setting informal goals throughout my college years in the mid-90s. My first set of goals were more like a test for me: how exactly do these things work? How should I write them so that they matter? How should I track my progress against them? I didn’t know any of those answers at the time, and looking back at my 2000 goals, they were a combination of core values, a personal mission statement, things I wanted to achieve “someday”, and very specific things I wanted to achieve that year. A total hodgepodge.

Over the past 10 years, my goals have become a lot more refined. I now have a very clear and specific set of goals for each year, as well as a 5-year plan – and I reserve time each year to reflect, celebrate, and refresh my goals. My personal goals have become far more focused on my family and on intrinsic personal growth, and less about specific circumstances or desired outcomes when compared to my goals from 10 years ago. I’ve spent the better part of the past decade perfecting what goal-setting means for me, and in the process feel like I’ve reached a point of real Zen about the process.

These 12 traits are the most important attributes of goals I’ve found, and many of them have been validated in University studies. While there are others that didn’t make the list, these are the qualities I most look for in my goals each year.

Goals should be:

Holistic. Each goal must fit like a puzzle piece with all other goals. If your goals aren’t holistically aligned, you’ll quickly find that you’re working in conflict with yourself. As an example, if one of your goals is to spend more time with your family, and another is to start a business in another state, you’ll find yourself at odds. Your goals need to work together or the whole thing could go up in smoke.
Value driven. Your goals need to speak to who you are at the core. This means you need to know yourself and understand what drives you. For example, if you’re someone who lives to spend time with your grandchildren, it’s important that your goals reflect that joy. If your goals reflected someone else’s values or society’s at large (material wealth based on social comparison) and not your own, you may find yourself chasing down the wrong thing at the expense of what really makes you tick.
Personal. Are you someone who likes to spend the majority of time with lots of other people, or do you like to spend your time alone or with a small close-knit group? Are you someone who likes things to be predictable or someone who thrives on chaos? These aren’t small considerations when it comes to setting goals. You want to make sure you know under which circumstances you’ll thrive best, otherwise you’ll end up with a goal you don’t even want to look at. One fun evaluation of this is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – derive goals from your personality type and have a better shot at success.
Fresh. Setting goals is not something rigid and unbending, it’s actually a very fluid process. If you’re only setting goals every few years, and only looking at them annually, there’s a pretty good chance your goals don’t align with your current reality. That’s a sure way to ignore them. Instead, your goals need to be fresh and adjusted on a semi-regular basis. My own timeframe is annually – with monthly check-ins and readjustments. What’s yours?
Scoped. Only you know how many goals you should have in order to feel balanced. Too many goals and you can become crushed by the weight of them. Too few and you’re failing to realize your full potential. This may take some adjustment, and it may take years to find the right rhythm, but sooner or later you’ll find the scope of goals most appropriate for you. I’ve had as few as five and as many as twenty for the year – each year is also somewhat different depending on the variables at play.
Habit forming. Goals that are habit forming are far more powerful than goals that are solely about the outcome. For instance, if you’d like to get a 5% pay increase, the best way to make that happen is to break down your behavior and get the right habits in place to enact positive change. Don’t focus on the increase in pay, that’s just a byproduct of the success you’ve created. The increase in pay may (or may not be) an indirect result, but the more lasting and important change is in your day-to-day approach. Habits are the building blocks of goals.
Present tense. “By February, I’d like to buy my first home” isn’t a present tense goal. “I’m a homeowner and have found and purchased my first home” is. Trick yourself into believing you’ve already accomplished your goal. By reaffirming this with yourself with each review, you’ll find that your goals come more easily. I’m not talking about some mystical “Law of Attraction” – I’m talking about proactive reinforcement and implicit influence of your self.
Positive. Studies have shown that people are more apt to achieve “approach” goals vs. “avoidance” goals, so your goals should be positive in nature. In other words, make your goals about enablement and the things you’re going to do, not the things you don’t want to do. If you want to quit smoking, you want your goal to be about improving your health or setting the right example for your children – not constantly calling attention to the thing you’re depriving yourself of. “Stop taking daily cigarette breaks” is tough to rally behind, but “Improve my health and overall well-being and show my kids how to live a healthy life” is motivating.
Challenge/skill balanced. Sound familiar? That’s right – this is a core component of Flow. You want to have a goal that take you closer to the Flow state and not goals that make you bored, overwhelmed, or otherwise apathetic. The key is to find the right balance between the challenge involved, and the skill you’re developing to address that challenge. From Csikszentmihalyi’s Wikipedia entry: “If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. Both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, then apathy results.”
Want-to. A goal can quickly degrade to perceived work if it feels like an imperative. Yes, there are things you have to do in life, but your goals – in order to really work – have to be things you actually want to do. The process of setting your goals alone can open your eyes to how many things you do on a regular basis that aren’t things you actually want to do. And even if some of your goals are have-to goals, you should figure out how best to phrase them as want-to goals. For example, you have to go to work in order to get paid. But you want to close 10 sales/week in order to be at the top of the sales force for the year. And if you don’t want it at all, maybe it’s time to pull out your copy of What Color is Your Parachute and change something bigger.
Lasting. Goals that are subject to hedonic adaptation aren’t lasting enough to focus on, while goals that have long-term value can make a serious positive difference in your life. For example, buying a brand new $50,000 car may be a great goal – but research has shown that after some time (shorter than most of us think) we adapt to changes in our circumstances, returning our level of happiness back to where it started. The best goals are the ones that compound on themselves – similar to compound interest in your retirement account – and “keep on giving” long after they’ve been accomplished. For instance, learning a new language or skill, spending time with friends and family, or organizing your life are all more impactful long-term than buying a new gadget (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with buying gadgets!).
Shared. Most of us aren’t an island – we have life partners, spouses, kids, close friends, pets, and imaginary friends. While it may seem that goal-setting is an isolated experience, it shouldn’t be. The things you decide to commit yourself to are, in some cases, just as important to the people around you as they are to you. And (to speak in project management terms): you need to get buy-in from the stakeholders before making any commitment.

These 12 attributes have helped me take a process that was pretty vague at first, and turn that ambiguity into smarter goals over time. It isn’t that having SMART goals isn’t important – it’s just that it isn’t nearly enough if you want to both succeed and improve your happiness level during the process.

My recommendation is to start simple: pick a single goal you’d like to target, tweak it until it meets this criteria, set a date on the calendar, and go for it. Start with something that can be scoped to 30 days at first; if your first goal is something you won’t be able to see success with for years, it’s not a good first step. Once you’ve been able to succeed with one goal, you’ll be able to repeat the process as many times as is feasible for you (see #5 above). Eventually, you’ll get it down to a science!

Have fun

Precommitment: Commit in Advance to Keep Yourself On Track

Mike Torres — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:51:44 +0000

Our future and current selves rarely see eye-to-eye. As much as we’d like to indulge in every short-term pleasurable activity as they present themselves, it’s not always the best thing for us when we look at our life in its totality. Our time perspective can go a long way to optimizing for the right focus at the right time, making sure we indulge when we can (being “present hedonist”) but also keep an eye on the long-term prize (being “future goal-oriented”). With the right time perspective we can make sure we’re not foregoing our health, our life goals, or any multi-step, complex accomplishments for today’s six-pack of beer, a McDonald’s Happy Meal, or 10 hours of mindless television. It’s one thing to claim that time perspective can “solve” this for us, but that feels too theoretical. Time perspective is about strategy, but there are also tactics we can use to adapt to a new time perspective. One of the tactics that can help us adapt is precommitment.

The term precommitment was first introduced by a Nobel-prize winning economist named Thomas Schelling as part of a self-management system called Egonomics. Calling Egonomics a “system” may not be entirely accurate since it was originally described as “the art of self-management” in a research paper (available here). At the core of Egonomics is the idea that within each person exists two selves: the future self and the present (or past) self, constantly at odds, leading to a sort of cognitive dissonance between the two. Both selves exist within us and are equally valid, but aren’t always active at the same time. It’s a natural and ongoing conflict between immediate desire and long-term goals.

“Many of us have little tricks we play on ourselves to make us do the things we ought to do or to keep us from the things we out to foreswear. Sometimes we put things out of reach for the moment of temptation, sometimes we promise ourselves small rewards, and sometimes we surrender authority to a trustworthy friend who will police our calories or our cigarettes. We place the alarm clock across the room so we cannot turn it off without getting out of bed. People who are chronically late set their watches a few minutes ahead to deceive themselves.” – Thomas Schelling, “Egonomics, or the Art of Self-Management”

Precommitment is one way to address this tension. The basic idea is to increase your chances for success by doing things in advance to make it harder, if not impossible, for your future self to find a way to “back out”. It’s similar to an idea discussed in the context of the Getting Things Done system: Always assume your future self is lazy. But with precommitment, you’re perhaps taking it even further in that you’re not just presupposing laziness, you’re practically dragging your future self kicking and screaming toward the “right thing” by taking away his or her alternative options.

Schelling developed his theories while looking at conflict management between nation-states, particularly those with nuclear weapons. In fact, his Nobel Prize was for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis." So it’s no surprise that a lot of the tactics he discussed with respect to self-management relate directly to military application. Precommitment in this context is described as a strategy where a party to a conflict can strengthen its position by cutting off options to make its threats more credible. One of the most common examples of precommitment is Cortés torching his own ships at Veracruz so his men couldn’t consider retreating home. A more modern, geeky example would be the sendoff of the ships in the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.

Precommitment is one of the many tools in our imaginary toolboxes as we work towards a balanced perspective of short-term pleasure vs. long-term advances. It’s a great “life hack”; one that you’ll find in almost every realm of personal development ranging from managing finances to improving your marriage to getting in shape. Now that you can identify it, you can start to be aware when you come across it – and you can explore ways to introduce precommitment into your own everyday life.

Here are some examples of precommitment:

Don’t buy food at the grocery store you don’t want yourself eating at a later date.
Don’t carry cigarettes around with you, put the burden on your future self to bum one from someone.
Sign-up and pay in advance for a seminar, class, or a personal trainer.
Arrange in advance to meet someone at the gym or the outdoor track (accountability!)
Make your next dentist/doctor/hair appointment on your way out of one, noting the penalty you’ll pay for skipping.
Buy clothes a size or two smaller than you currently wear.
Setup an automatic withdrawal from your paycheck into an investment account every month, or add future expenses to your register before you have the funds to pay them.
Get a ride to work on a day you want to walk or ride your bike home.
Book and pay for time away from work or home in advance.
Leave your laptop at work so you aren’t tempted to use it.
Give friends and family a date they should expect something from you.

There are many more examples out there of how precommitment can help keep you moving forward. Let me know if you already employ precommitment… or if you plan to!

12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)

Use Controlled Bursts of Focus to Leap Ahead And Find Balance

Mike Torres — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:50:05 +0000

Finding balance is top of mind for so many people. As a topic of interest, it’s increasing in popularity on the web and in books and magazines year over year. It’s no wonder that in a 2007 survey by the American Psychological Association (APA), 48% of Americans surveyed feel their lives have become more stressful in the past five years. When you add up all of the inboxes you’re struggling to manage each day just to feel productive, and then add the expectation that you feel you need to react immediately, it’s no surprise. People have a lot of plates spinning simultaneously. More than one third of the people surveyed in this study feel that work encroaching on personal time was the reason for their increased stress. So naturally, finding balance is a life-essential skill for 2009 and beyond. Heck, even the contributors at Wikipedia agree, “As the separation between work and home life has diminished, this concept has become more relevant than ever before.”

But what does balance really mean – and couldn’t it mean different things to different people? When people talk about balance, they’re frequently referring to work/life balance. A quick search on “work life balance” yields a number of results seemingly indicating that work/life balance means working a 9-5 job and then “shutting off”, compartmentalizing your work and home life. When you’re at work, you aren’t thinking about your home life – and when you’re at home, you definitely aren’t “worrying” about work. There are steps you can take to protect your personal time such as refusing to answer email off-hours, setting expectations up-front with your employer that you’re offline as soon as you walk out the door, planning recreational activities and sticking to a schedule, and so on.

Naturally I’m a big believer in embracing the present moment. But what if pure compartmentalization can lead to mediocrity? What if in the struggle for daily balance, you’re missing out on long-term accomplishment and complete contentment? If every single day contained a healthy balance over the course of a lifetime, would you meet or exceed the goals you set out for yourself? Would that make you happier or more content, or would it leave you feeling empty?

Years ago while still in college, I helped start a company with a couple good friends. It was an incredibly busy time for me; I was in my final year at Cornell University and was working to balance my class schedule to give myself enough time to focus on our new venture, while at the same time making sure I wouldn’t fail to graduate at the end of the year. I was in a serious relationship. I was also going through the job hunting process to make sure I’d have a job after graduation in the (very possible) chance the company didn’t succeed.

It was during this time I remember first really struggling with balance, and I spoke to a friend of mine about it. I’ll never forget what he said when I mentioned I didn’t feel rested and hadn’t exercised in a few days (an anomaly for me back then) because we had all been working so hard:

Finding balance doesn’t always have to be an everyday thing. You need to make sure you’re finding balance at a cadence that works for you – maybe that’s weekly, maybe that’s monthly, or maybe it’s annually. Look at finding balance in the aggregate and don’t worry about the details.

Since then, I’ve tried to leverage controlled bursts of focus to help me find balance in the aggregate, while at the same time accomplish the things I want to accomplish and feel content with the progress I’m making.

A controlled burst of focus can be defined at the highest level as a disruption to daily balance. It’s the string of nights you spend working on a project, or the few weeks spent sampling six different fitness classes. It’s also the vacation when you do nothing but read and spend time with your family.

It’s extra time and energy devoted to something that helps you make materially more progress than you would during a normal, balanced routine. If you plan to breakthrough mediocrity, controlled bursts of focus are a requirement. You won’t find many accomplished people who’ve always had a perfectly balanced day each day of their lives.

However, there’s a fine line between controlled bursts and an unhealthy, prolonged overemphasis on something. Before going too far with controlled bursts, check out these tips:

Make sure your focus isn’t distracted because of something that ultimately isn’t important to you. Pick your top 3 focus areas and drop everything else. If you find yourself sacrificing too much for something that doesn’t resonate with your values, it’s doubtful this will result in contentment. Instead it will just result in resentment.
Embrace emergent focus by applying all of your attention to the thing you’re most interested in at that exact moment… without guilt over what you’re not doing. In other words, if you find yourself in a groove at work with double the productivity and passion you normally have, use it! It’s a gift. This is frequently how ‘peak experiences’ come to be. So even if it means a little less balance on a day-to-day basis, it may be worth it.
Kick start your interest in other areas if you find yourself unmotivated to break free from a burst. This will help you from getting carried away with a single burst, and let you get back to an overall balanced state over the long haul.
Control the burst of focus and measure it if you have to. Make sure you don’t get sucked into an unhealthy state and start letting other important things hit the floor. If it helps, use a time log or a journal and make sure you’re not getting sucked into something at the expense of everything else. Give yourself a deadline when you’ll “snap out of it” and get back to a more balanced routine.
Use a visual to help justify your energy investment. The visual that helps me the most is a surface chart of my focus areas for the year. Ultimately, I want the total surface area of each to be approximately equal (note that this isn’t time spent, it’s just a subjective estimate of focus applied to each area). Here’s a sample surface chart using my three focus areas (it isn’t using real data).
As is probably expected, some months have more dedicated focus on certain areas than others:

Bottom line: Controlled bursts of focus can help you leap ahead and achieve balance in the aggregate. So long as you’re honest about what you’re sacrificing and why, bursts can be an indispensible tool for overall, long-term focus, accomplishment, and contentment.

Thoughts? I’d love to hear them. Comment below!

Does Goal Setting Hold Us Back?

Mike Torres — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:43:36 +0000

Over the years I’ve read many criticisms of “pop psychology”, specifically relating to the notion that setting goals is a necessary precursor to actually achieving them. There are people who believe that the very act of setting goals is what holds people back from achieving something they’d otherwise be drawn towards. Sort of like a reverse law of attraction.

Now, I’m a big fan of thinking critically and applying a skeptic’s eye towards everything, so instead of ignoring perspectives that differ from mine, I try to really internalize them, live with them, and apply anything particularly useful to my own approach.

So before going further, let’s recap some of the most prevalent critiques of setting goals:

People with goals are future focused and not focused on the present moment. By focusing on something that hasn’t happened yet, they’re not focusing on what’s happening now. Goal setting is by definition counter to living a present and conscious life.
Goals are rigid and unchanging despite changes around them. Someone who set a goal to save an additional $10,000 in January 2008 just to lose $30,000 in the stock market by October for instance. By having a rigid goal that wasn’t adjusted for everyday reality, this person wasn’t able to react quickly enough to changing market conditions. While others reacted quickly, this person stayed attached to a false goal.
Goal setting leads to a loss of meaningful relationships. People who are so focused on achievement can fail to focus appropriately on the things that really matter in life: connection with other human beings. Spend too much time blindly following a goal instead of just living and relationships start to break down.
Setting goals can make fun things feel like work. The immediate reaction people have to deadlines and commitments is to balk. People don’t like to be told what to do and when they need to get it done – they long to be free. If someone – even themselves – tells them they have to achieve something by a specific date, they’re not going to have fun in the process even if it’s something they enjoy.
Setting goals absolves people of thinking critically. In a Northwestern University paper called “Goals Gone Wild”, Professor Adam Galinsky makes the claim that “[goal setting] can focus attention too much, or on the wrong things; it can lead to crazy behaviors to get people to achieve them.” There have also been papers written about how “goals and other incentives can constrict our thinking” by giving us an unneeded fallback plan. Why think for yourself when you know you have to achieve the goal at all costs?

Naturally, just like most things in life, there’s a much more nuanced way to think about this.

People with experience setting (and achieving) commitments for themselves realize that goals have to be pointers down a possible path, but not the path itself.

In other words: if you’re going to set goals for yourself, you have to acknowledge that this is just the start of the journey. Goal setting takes work in order to be effective, and you need to commit to following up on your commitments before you can commit to following through on them. The downsides to goal setting are very real for some people – so your #1 goal is to not be like these people! This means you need to take a very mindful approach to the process.

Here are some ways to do this:

Write your goals down and refer back to them sometimes, but ignore them most of the time. One of the non-obvious benefits of good planning is that it actually encourages spontaneity and being in the moment. If you’ve identified your goals and set aside the appropriate amount of time to progress, shouldn’t you be able to “let go” and be in the moment when you’re in it? You can free your mind knowing you’ve planned for everything else.
Adjust your goals on a semi-regular basis to align to your current reality. Some people think that adjusting your goals quarterly or even just once per year is counterproductive and giving yourself an “out”. Not me. Every couple months I make sure my goals are still accurate – otherwise what’s the point in having them? The world around me may have changed, or I may have changed. My goals should change as well. Just be careful that you’re not giving yourself an excuse to pull back; all that matters is that you’re being honest with yourself.
Don’t put achievement above connection with other people. This may be a challenge for some, but no good can come from standing on the top of the mountain… alone. This could also mean keeping your goals personal; talk too much about all the things you plan to do with your life with other people and you could drive them away with your intensity. Or just make them feel inadequate! And nothing hurts relationships more than a mismatch like that.
Stop thinking about it as work! Easier said than done; this one takes some practice. Your goals can’t all be things you dislike doing – but there are times when you may not be super-motivated to do them anyway. The plate spinning analogy and striving to find flow regularly can help here.
Be aware when you use your goals as a crutch to avoid problem solving. Instead of using your goals as a way to avoid critical thinking, use them as a way to promote it. You need to be both a goal setter AND a problem solver. In fact, the people who are best equipped to achieve their goals are the ones who are best able to solve problems along the way. You need to look at your goals as just the start; each one is a series of problems to solve, decisions to make, and things to do.

And finally: embrace emergence which can be the best way to deal with the perceived rigidity of goals. There’s a teaching approach called emergent curriculum which encourages a loose curriculum with kids in favor of following their interests to help guide the lesson plan. As it’s been described to me, the kids don’t “run” the curriculum, but their interest in topics helps direct it. In many ways, this is similar to goal setting – you can leverage your own emergent focus to achieve your goals. What does this mean? First a quick definition.

Emergent focus (def’n): applying all of your attention to the thing you’re most interested in at that exact moment… without guilt over what you’re not doing; a made-up term for this blog

Because all of us are multi-faceted and our interests and goals span various areas, emergent focus can be the best way to both achieve your goals and find flow “being in the now” at the same time. It basically means doing the thing you’re most interested in doing at that moment to further progress towards a specific goal instead of forcing yourself to do something to further progress towards another goal. With emergent focus, you can’t allow yourself to feel guilt over not doing something. Instead you should be so immersed in the thing you are doing that you don’t have time to worry!

(This does assume your goals are things you want to do and enjoy doing to various extents)

I’ve found being aware of emergent focus to be invaluable. Because my goals are all things I enjoy, there will be times I’m more inclined to progress towards one goal than another. I usually can’t predict where my interests will take me on any given week. So instead of forcing myself into a rigid structure and beating myself up for not achieving what I expected to by a certain date, I embrace my emerging interest and passion about something and make progress with that thing instead. It may result in a change to my goals – and if so, that’s OK – but it usually doesn’t. I just need to be confident knowing full well that if the things I’m not doing are important to me, they’ll come back eventually!

This post is longer than I set out for it to be as always, so I’m going to end it here Hope this was helpful! Do you find setting goals to be helpful or harmful?

Pick Your Top 3 Focus Areas… and Drop Everything Else

Mike Torres — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:18:07 +0000

Focusing on what matters most to you is the only way you can make material progress towards your goals. Typically when you talk to people who are so stressed out they can’t see straight, they complain that they simply have too much to do and feel overwhelmed. When you dig a little deeper, you almost always discover that they’re trying to do too much to begin with and are trying to be too many things to too many people. They don’t have a North Star to keep them moving towards their goals and may not even know what’s actually important to them. They just feel like they’re failing at everything and need help.

A while back I was at a conference with a senior executive of one of the most successful companies in the world. An audience member asked him how he got to where he is, expecting an answer along the lines of “I work all the time”, “This company is my life”, or “I’m on email at midnight and then again at 5am”. His answer was simple. He said, “I realized early on that I couldn’t do everything if I wanted to be good at anything. So I thought about the three things that were most important to me and pretty much eliminated the rest. This means I can excel in those three areas without any guilt since I know these are the most important to me. And I don’t spend time regretting what I’m not doing because it’s a choice I made.”

He called it ruthless focus. He probably used the word ruthless because it was as much about the things he wasn’t going to do as it was about the things he was doing. Some of the other things he wanted to do just weren’t going to get his attention if he were going to buckle down and focus on his top three things. And he had come to terms with that.

When you think about this in context, it makes a lot of sense. People at the top of their fields have ruthless focus. I’d bet you wouldn’t find Tiger Woods perfecting his knitting skills on a Sunday afternoon no matter how much he may love to knit. Bill Gates loved running Microsoft, but realized that in order to take the next step in his philanthropic mission, he was going to have to step down and narrow his focus. Barack Obama is probably happy just getting some time on the basketball court every week; you won’t find him practicing his jump shot in the White House gym until the wee hours of the morning. But (according to articles on his typical day) he never misses his daily workout, and he always has breakfast and dinner with his family no matter what craziness constitutes a “day at the office” for him. He knows what his top areas of focus are.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama also made an interesting observation of the priorities of an administration. He said (paraphrasing), “Don’t tell me what your priorities are. I can determine what they are just by looking at the budget and seeing where you’re choosing to spend your money. Where you spend your money is what your priorities are.”

So how does this translate to focus? Simple: where you spend your time is what your priorities are. If you claim your family is your top priority but you only get to spend a couple hours with them each week, how does that compute? If you say your health is important to you but you haven’t hit the gym in over a month, you probably have some things to think about.

You don’t have to be an insanely gifted athlete, the richest person in the world, or the leader of the free world in order to figure out what’s most important for you to focus on. You just need to figure it out, write it down, and then pivot the bulk of your activities around those things.

If you had to pick three things, what would they be? Write them down somewhere and then take a look at how you spent your time last week: do you feel like your top three got the attention they deserve? Are things showing up that aren’t a part of your top three? How would you shift around your time allocation to make sure you’re excelling at the top three and dropping all the unimportant things?

For reference, my top three focus areas are:

Family (spending as much quality time with my family as I can)
Career (building best in class software and leading a great team)
Self-Development (ex: reading, writing, meditation, martial arts, fitness)

Almost every second of every day is spent on one of those three things.

There are a dozen things I would love to add to this list if I had more time. If I could I would join a baseball league, become a better photographer, become a better skier, live in Europe, study another martial art, and learn to race my car on a track. But none of these things are more important to me than excelling at my top three… so they get limited attention, and that’s OK. I try and get to the batting cages a few times per year, I ski a couple times each winter, and I try and take as many photos as I can given the time I have. And that’s good enough! No regrets.

Those are my top three focus areas. What are yours?