A Goal-Setting & Planning System for Excellence – Manifesting The Future You Want (WIP)

You are reading a work-in-progress draft (60% done). These are published for the benefit of curious individuals.

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Preface

If you’d peeked into my life during those undergraduate days, you’d have seen me everywhere—leading our university’s consultancy, nurturing a community of prestigious scholarship holders, working part-time as a consultant, exploring the craft of coaching, and even taking my first tentative steps into the world of YouTube.

I was a blur of motion, but deep down, I knew something was off. It felt like I was running in place, confusing hustle with actual progress. It’s one thing to be busy, quite another to be impactful.

So, I set out to untangle this mess. I needed a strategy, a system that would let me set well-considered goals and forge robust plans. This wasn’t a walk in the park. There was a lot of trial and error along the way to make this work effectively. For example, I realized setting grand yearly goals felt good, but they were just daydreams and gimmicks unless I have workflows that force me to engage with them freuqenly.

I’m sharing the system that helped me manifest the future I wanted.

Introduction

What are you trying to accomplish this week? What about this year? Something probably came to mind as you read those questions. The thoughts were likely goals you’ve already had or the seeds of potential new goals. 

Goals express a change we want to see in the external or internal world. They are usually and reasonably limited to our perceived sphere of influence and control. Our environment will change regardless of our doing, but we can influence it. We can promote virtues and specific states in the world. Our greatness will not show itself by accident. We need to aim for it. No one gets to publish a book or do an Iron Man by chance or luck alone. Worthwhile achievements in life require long-term planning. We need to set worthwhile goals and develop a robust plan that guides our daily actions.

Some of us may have already dabbled in goal-setting. We may even have given up on goal-setting because we consistently watched ourselves setting goals and then not reaching them. If that resonates, please don’t despair. Goal-setting is a skill; as with any new skill, it’s unreasonable to expect ourselves to be good at it from the get-go. 

In this article, I will share what has proven to help people in setting worthwhile goals and developing robust plans. As always, I’ll also present a detailed step-wise process for setting goals and learning how to get better at it. The information should enable you to bring more flourishing into the world by crafting superb goals and plans.

The Process

Before discussing what a goal is, I’ll start by briefly introducing the steps of an excellent Goal-Setting and Planning System (G&P System). While I will explain the processual components in detail later, this preliminary introduction serves as a useful context for understanding the relationship between goal-setting and planning. 

There are six components, each of which will be briefly introduced below

• Discovery

• Selection

• Formulation

• Planning

• Evaluation & reviewing

• Rewarding

The first step in goal-setting is discovery. In this step, we use various tools to help identify good potential goals before we select any goals to commit to.

The next step of goal-setting is selection. At this step, we narrow down the list of possible goals generated in the discovery step and ultimately select what goals to pursue.

The third step of the process is goal formulation. Here, we take all the goals we ended up with from the selection step and restate them, as needed, by applying the criteria that make up good goals. For example, we may want to make our goals measurable. If one of our goals from the selection step was “find a job”, we may restate it as “find a job that pays $50,000 per year by December 31”.

The fourth step is planning. At this stage, we’ll set sub-goals and consider why we might fail to reach our goal. In doing so, we can make our plans more robust before we implement them and start pursuing our goal. 

The fifth step of the process is evaluation & reviewing. Here, we think about the systems we have in place for continuously reviewing and keeping track of progress toward our goals. In addition, we take into account new information we’ve acquired that is relevant to how we pursue our goals and which ones. One aspect of this is being open to changing priorities between our goals. For example, if you’re a knowledge worker doing desk work for a living, and if you suddenly develop severe lower back pain, tending to this would probably become a high priority, which would likely mean that other goals would (temporarily) become less of a priority than they were before.

Pursuing our goals should feel rewarding. Accordingly, the sixth step is where we reward ourselves for our accomplishments. The point is to make ourselves feel good about taking action on our goals and reaching them. 

Disambiguating Terminology

What, exactly, is a goal? We’ve all heard the term before, and we’ll no doubt have at least an intuitive understanding of what “goal” means. I define a goal as 

an observable desired state in the future that causes you to act differently in the present to realize it

Let’s unpack the definition. If a goal is an observable future state, then we can aim for it and use it as a yardstick later on. If setting a goal causes you to act differently in the present to realize it, then having provides a benefit. Without these qualities, the concept of a goal would be useless.

Distinguishing goals from related terms

There are many synonyms for goals. For example, “vision”, “objective”, “target”, “aspiration” and many others. As long as we’re clear about what we mean, it doesn’t really matter which term we use. I prefer to stick to the word “goal” because it’s less laden with connotations than some other terms. However, to understand a concept, it often helps to contrast it with related concepts that are similar but different. For that reason, I’ll discuss some relevant synonyms.

Goal-related words capture different nuances of desired future states. As such, they don’t have identical meanings. Let’s start with “dream”. A dream is something more aspirational. It’s perhaps most often used about desired states many years into the future and is usually quite imaginative. Unlike goals, dreams are often less connected to concrete action plans. For example, perhaps we had a dream of becoming an astronaut or a firefighter when we were a child. This is an expression of a wish that usually is not underpinned by a serious effort to develop an effective plan.

What about corporate lingo, such as “vision”, “mission”, and “strategy”? These terms illustrate that goal-related terms often have different meanings depending on the context, resulting in semantic confusion. For example, companies and organizations will talk about “mission statements” and their “vision for the future,” which is not quite the same as if a friend tells you that they’re about to go on a mission in the Alps.

Goal-related terms differ in specificity and time horizons 

One variable on which goal-related terms often differ is specificity. We discussed dreams as an example of a goal-related term that, contrasted with goals, is characterized by a lack of specificity and the absence of an action plan. Another example might be “aspiration”. On the contrary, an example of a high degree of specificity might be “objective”, by which people tend to mean something tangible and often quite near-term. For example, an easily measurable outcome that has to be met within a couple of months. 

Goal-related terms also differ with respect to their implicit time horizon. For example, if we’re on a “mission” that suggests a longer time horizon than if we have an “objective”. A mission might last ten years into the future, whereas it might confuse people if we talked about having an objective with a deadline ten years from now. 

The phenomenon we’ve discussed here is quite common. When terminology moves from academia or business into everyday language, concepts with (subtly) different meanings tend to become synonyms or identical in meaning when used in everyday language. This appears to have happened with the terminology of goal-setting. 

Obviously, we get to choose for ourselves which terms to use. We may want to decide based on the criteria of motivation and clarity; we’ll probably want our terminology to motivate and excite us to take action. If it ignites us to think about “aspirations” rather than “goals”, that is a meaningful factor. But we also don’t want to confuse people by stipulating new meanings for words that already carry very different meanings based on how those words are being used by other people (especially if you want to make use of your terminology in an organizational context or similar). 

Have excellent goals with excellent plans, processes, and systems

How do goals relate to plans, processes, and systems? 

Goals tell us where we want to go and what we want to see in the world, while plans, processes, and systems are what help us get there. The discussion of how plans related to processes and systems will be added in a later version.

A Plan

Plans lay out how we will go from where we currently are to our desired future state. Essentially, a plan is a set of actions to take (often) in a particular order or under particular conditions (i.e., a contingency plan). We might want to get granular when making plans and flesh them out in any level of detail that seems useful. For example, adding specificity to the various steps of the plan, such as specifying when something needs to happen and where we’ll work on it. That is, our plan might have deadlines for each step and perhaps even foreseeable obstacles we’d like to prevent. 

Later in this article, I’ll discuss how to make robust plans. For now, a rough understanding of the relationship between goals and plans will do, as it enables us to consider different goal-plan combinations that will help illuminate common pitfalls. 

Let’s construct a beloved 2×2 matrix (+1). Assuming that goals and plans can be either good or poor/non-existent, we have four relevant combinations to consider. I’ll discuss them in order:

1. 1. Goal x no plan
   2. Poor goal x ineffective plan
   3. Poor goal x effective plan
   4. Good goal x ineffective plan
   5. Good goal x effective plan

A goal without a plan 

A goal without a plan has been conceptualized as a wish. Imagine someone who wants to reduce global catastrophic risks. Instead of taking a step back and thinking about a plan to achieve that goal, they immediately start advocating for various causes without prioritizing them or considering their own capabilities and resources. They spread themselves thin across multiple initiatives, from climate change advocacy to promoting AI safety, without a clear strategy or understanding of how they can contribute most effectively. This approach can lead to burnout, with little impact on the causes they care about. A goal without a plan, in this case, lacks the strategic focus and actionable steps necessary for making a tangible difference in reducing global catastrophic risks. It’s akin to setting sail without a compass or map; the direction and destination are known, but the path to get there is unclear. To move from wishful thinking to impactful action, it’s crucial to develop a detailed plan that considers specific areas of focus, measurable objectives, and a timeline for achieving them, ensuring that efforts are both meaningful and directed.

Poor goal with a poor plan

Continuing with the theme of reducing global catastrophic risks with a focus on AI safety, let’s consider a scenario involving a poorly defined goal and an ineffective plan.

Consider a person deeply concerned about AI safety who sets a broad, ambitious goal: “Ensure AI is safe for humanity.” While the intention behind this goal is commendable, the goal formulation is poor.

Specificity and bad goals – Its breadth and lack of specificity render it impractical for individual action. This goal fails to identify which aspects of AI safety to prioritize—be it ethical guidelines, technical safeguards, or AI policy. Without concrete, measurable objectives, it becomes a lofty aspiration rather than a feasible target, ignoring the complex, multidimensional nature of AI safety that demands concerted efforts across various domains.

Time and bad goals – The absence of a defined timeline further muddies the goal. The question of “When?” looms large—Is the aim to secure AI within months, years, or decades? This ambiguity hinders the ability to adapt strategies based on new insights, rendering even well-meaning goals ineffective. A goal with an unrealistically short timeline, like ensuring AI safety within a month, compounds this issue, pushing towards potentially hazardous shortcuts.

Psychology and bad goals – The emotional impact of consistently failing to meet such lofty goals can lead to disillusionment and a sense of helplessness. This cycle of disappointment might discourage goal-setting altogether, robbing us of the drive to pursue meaningful achievements aligned with personal values.

The flawed plan – The plan devised to achieve this goal is equally flawed. The individual decides to single-handedly develop a comprehensive framework for AI safety, despite lacking expertise in critical areas such as machine learning, ethical implications, and regulatory standards. They pour effort and resources into crafting a universal safety protocol, drawing mainly on their limited understanding and isolated from the broader AI research community. This solitary endeavor leads to an oversimplified framework that fails to grasp or effectively address the intricate, evolving challenges of AI safety. The approach, though driven by a genuine desire to contribute, overlooks the importance of collaborative research, expert consultation, and integration with ongoing efforts in the field.

A poor goal with a good plan

How could you make a good – or at least better – plan for ensuring AI is safe for humanity? They could start by educating themselves through research, attending conferences, and engaging with the AI safety community, the individual identifies specific areas where their efforts can be most beneficial. This knowledge equips them to focus their energies effectively, rather than spreading them thinly over the entire spectrum of AI safety concerns.

The refined plan then emphasizes active participation and collaboration within the AI safety ecosystem. The individual commits to contributing to projects and initiatives where their unique skills can make a difference, from technical contributions to open-source safety projects to advocacy for ethical AI development practices. They also prioritize building awareness and supporting education in AI ethics and safety, both within their network and the broader community. Through these targeted actions, the individual transforms a broad aspiration into a series of achievable steps, each contributing to the larger goal of making AI universally safe. This methodical, focused approach ensures that their efforts are not only aligned with their ambitious goal but also grounded in practical, impactful activities within the AI safety domain.

A good goal with a good plan

Taking a focused and actionable approach, an individual sets the goal to “Contribute to the founding of the UN AI Safety Committee within the next five years,” transforming the broad vision of AI safety into a specific, achievable target. To realize this ambition, they devise a strategic plan centered on enhancing personal expertise, fostering collaborative relationships, and engaging in advocacy. This includes attending AI safety conferences to build a network, enhancing knowledge through targeted education, and actively participating in policy discussions. By raising public awareness and drafting policy proposals, they work towards establishing a solid foundation for the proposed committee, ensuring their efforts are directed towards tangible outcomes in AI governance.

The plan is dynamic, incorporating regular evaluations to adapt to the evolving landscape of AI technology and international policy. Feedback from the AI safety community and policymakers is crucial for refining strategies, enabling the individual to remain flexible and responsive to new challenges and opportunities. Through this systematic and adaptive approach, the goal of contributing significantly to AI safety at an international level becomes not just a vision, but a practical pathway to effecting meaningful change in the development and regulation of AI technologies, exemplifying the power of focused, strategic action in achieving ambitious objectives.

Benefits of the G&P System

By setting strategic goals and crafting detailed plans, individuals significantly increase their chances of achieving desired outcomes, regardless of life’s domain. The G&P system acts as a guide, directing thoughts, emotions, and actions towards goal fulfillment, and away from distractions or counterproductive behaviors.

How does G&P achieve this? 

Encouraging goal-focused cognitions, emotions, and behaviors

A good G&P system influences our day-to-day actions, thoughts, and emotions. It proves its versatility and effectiveness by applying equally well to personal ambitions, such as finding a highly compatible romantic partner, and to professional objectives, like reducing global catastrophic risks (GCRs) through priority-setting research. Let’s explore how the G&P system facilitates achieving these distinct types of goals:

Finding a Highly Compatible Romantic Partner

The G&P system prompts you to define what a “highly compatible” partner means to you, encouraging you to reflect on your values, interests, and the qualities you seek in a partner. This reflection process helps in formulating a clear mental picture of your goal, guiding your thoughts towards identifying where and how you might meet potential partners who align with your criteria.

By setting realistic expectations and timelines for meeting a compatible partner, the G&P system helps manage emotions such as anxiety or impatience that often accompany the search for a romantic connection. It fosters a positive outlook by framing each step (e.g., going on dates, trying new activities) as progress towards your goal, even if immediate success isn’t achieved, thus maintaining motivation and optimism.

With a clear goal in mind, your actions become more purposeful. You might join clubs or groups that align with your interests, sign up for dating apps with a clear strategy, or engage in social activities where you’re likely to meet like-minded individuals. The G&P system encourages behaviors that are directly linked to your goal of finding a compatible partner, making your efforts more focused and efficient.

Creating a High-Performing Research Team on GCRs

The G&P system requires you to think strategically about the composition of your team, the skills and knowledge bases needed, and the specific areas of GCR you aim to address. This leads to goal-focused cognition as you assess potential team members’ fit with the team’s mission, consider the research agenda, and plan for the dissemination of your findings to maximize impact.

Building a team to tackle GCRs can be daunting given the stakes involved. The G&P system helps in managing feelings of overwhelm or doubt by breaking down the goal into manageable tasks (e.g., recruiting experts, securing funding, defining research priorities). It cultivates a sense of purpose and collective drive among team members, leveraging the emotional commitment to the cause to foster a collaborative and resilient team dynamic.

With the end goal of reducing GCRs guiding your planning, your behaviors align with achieving this objective. This includes networking with potential team members and stakeholders, applying for grants, and setting up regular team meetings to ensure progress. The G&P system encourages you to engage in behaviors that build the team’s capacity, drive research forward, and engage with the broader community to influence policy and practice related to GCRs.

In both examples, the G&P system plays a crucial role in steering cognitions, emotions, and behaviors towards the achievement of personal and professional goals. By providing a structured approach to goal setting and planning, it ensures that efforts are not just well-intentioned but also strategic, directed, and adaptable to changing circumstances or insights.

Discouraging  goal-unrelated thoughts, feelings, and actions

By committing to specific goals, we inherently set boundaries for our thoughts, emotions, and actions. This commitment acts as a mental guide, discouraging engagement in activities that stray from our path. For instance, when dedicated to a significant project, this focus discourages wandering thoughts about unrelated leisure activities, thereby conserving cognitive energy for what’s deemed important.

The decision to prioritize a crucial project for a month simplifies numerous subsequent decisions. This pre-made choice eliminates the need for debate with every social invitation, reducing decision fatigue. Knowing that your energy is reserved for something you’ve identified as valuable makes it easier to bypass opportunities that could detract from your goal. This streamlined decision-making not only conserves mental resources but also fortifies your commitment to your chosen path, reinforcing a sense of purpose and direction.

This approach minimizes internal conflict about how best to use your time. By establishing clear goals and corresponding plans, you’re effectively communicating to yourself and others about what takes precedence in your life. This clarity reduces the emotional turmoil associated with saying “no” to others and the guilt of not pursuing every opportunity that comes your way. Your decisions become more intentional, aligned with your long-term aspirations rather than being swayed by momentary desires or external pressures.

Mitigating unwanted influences

Setting meaningful goals serves as a compass, guiding us toward intentional living and mitigating the sway of external influences that could lead us astray from our true desires and values. This intentional approach fosters a lifestyle where decisions and actions are aligned with personal aspirations and long-term well-being, rather than being dictated by transient impulses or societal pressures.

Navigating life without clear goals, we often find ourselves adrift, swayed by fleeting desires, social pressures, or prevailing cultural norms. There are moments when we choose to watch a specific TV show or opt for fast food simply because the urge strikes us. Indeed, part of our lives is meant to embrace these spontaneous joys. That’s why we savor vacations, lazy Sundays, and occasional indulgences. Yet, in the absence of guiding goals, we risk being perpetually drawn to these quick fixes and temporary delights, which seldom lead us toward what we truly value and desire.

The pursuit of pleasure, when balanced with purposeful goals, adds richness to life without dominating it. Goals provide a framework within which hedonistic pleasures can be enjoyed without guilt or detriment to our overall objectives. By making deliberate choices about when and how to engage in leisure activities, we ensure that these moments are genuinely rewarding and complement our broader life goals. This balance prevents the descent into a hedonistic treadmill where the chase for the next pleasure becomes an endless loop that never truly satisfies.

Moreover, the absence of goals can lead to a lifestyle imbalance, where we might neglect critical aspects of our well-being, such as physical health, personal development, and relationships. This could manifest in inadequate exercise or poor dietary choices, further detracting from our quality of life.  Goals prompt us to consider all facets of our well-being, encouraging a holistic approach to life. This proactive stance ensures that we don’t neglect important aspects of our health and happiness in favor of short-term pleasures or convenience

In essence, setting meaningful goals acts as a rudder, steering us not away from pleasure, but towards a more intentional and fulfilling life. It ensures that our pursuit of happiness is aligned with our deeper values and aspirations, fostering a life that feels rich, purposeful, and truly our own.

How to Build Your G&P System

Goal-setting is a delicate practice: it’s a skill that can be hard to learn, and we may easily become discouraged in the process. There’s also a big upside because goal-setting, when done well, can act as a force-multiplier. For these reasons, I’ll now discuss some important psychological aspects of goal-setting. In doing so, my hope is that you’ll start setting goals with a healthy mindset that makes it feel good to set, pursue and meet your goals. 

As usual, we need to define the system-level functions for our G&P system. As for the object-level professional and personal functions or goals, they are specified through a process I discuss later.

Specify Functions

The benefit section pointed towards different system-level functions. Using the system-level syntax, the G&P system should ensure that we

• execute our system consistently
• derive value continuously
• adapt it to the changing external environment and our individual psychology
• identify and select the most promising goals
• discourage goal-unrelated thoughts, feelings, and actions
• avoid imbalances in lifestyle and neglect of important areas, like physical health
• shape our behavior agentically and reduce unwanted influences
• streamline our day-to-day decisions and actions in alignment with our long-term objectives
• set goals across different time scales
• align shorter and longer goals with each other 

Optimize the processes

Any depiction of a linear process has to start with the obligatory disclaimer: reality isn’t as linear as the model suggest. The goal-setting and planning process is dynamic and the ideal process for you may deviate from the process presented here. We’ll explain each step of the process in what’s to come, but here’s an initial overview of the G&P process:

• Know yourself & adopt a growth mindset

• Discover

• Select

• Formulate

• Plan

• Evaluate & Iterate

• Reward

Know yourself

It is important to understand ourselves to establish an effective G&P system or refine it. Our G&P psychology describes how we relate to it. We can actively change our relationship through reflection and practice.

This can be done by different methods. One approach is to answer prompts that are designed to elicit insights related to our G&P psychology, such as these:

• If we stopped having goals and plans, why?
• If we don’t feel excited about our goals, why?
• What past goals felt particularly motivating?
• When we set deadlines for goals that were too optimistic or too pessimistic? Why?
• What past plans, processes, and systems led to greater goal achievement?
• What are the most common reasons goals are not achieved or plans don’t work out?
• Do we have negative associations with goals? Where might they come from?
• When we reach a goal, how do we feel? If we feel dissatisfaction despite the achievement, why?

Understanding ourselves requires effort, but it helps with making our G&P system more effective. The evaluate and iterate step needs to be closely tied to this preliminary self-reflection. 

Adopt a growth mindset

You are learning the art of goal-setting and planning. It’s a demanding skill that requires lots of practice, reflection, and self-experimentation to define excellent goals and develop robust and effective plans. Notice to what extent these perspectives make you feel more empowered compared to seeing it as something people should be quickly and without much effort good at. If you frame it as an art form and a skill you’re learning, you’ll probably find it a lot easier to accept that you may not be great at it initially! Making mistakes and learning from them is inherent in mastering the art of goal-setting and planning.

Discover worthwhile goals robustly

Begin by casting a wide net. This is the phase where anything and everything that sparks interest or excitement goes onto the list. It’s about dreaming big and small without restraint or concern for feasibility at this stage. Whether it’s learning a new language, writing a book, climbing a mountain, or making a career shift, every aspiration finds its place here. The key is to let your imagination and desires run free, capturing all the things you’ve ever wanted to do, be, or achieve.

Don’t brainstorm and select goals at the same time – When it comes to most creative processes, it’s better to separate the brainstorming phase from the selection phase. This approach ensures a clear, unhindered exploration of possibilities before committing to specific targets. It’s akin to allowing your mind to roam free across the landscape of your aspirations, gathering ideas without the immediate pressure to judge their feasibility or prioritize them. This distinction fosters creativity and ensures a broad, rich pool of potential goals to consider

Develop goals across different timescales – Before generating goals, I recommend deciding on the timescales the G&P system should cover. People usually work with ten-year (decade), yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and perhaps daily goals and plans. What works for most people is to have decade, yearly, quarterly, weekly, and daily goals and plans.

Ten-year goals can work well because they encourage aspirational thinking and because you can accomplish a lot in a decade – It’s a wide enough time window that you might be able to found, build and go public with a highly successful company (e.g., think Facebook or Amazon) within that time frame. Or you could plausibly write and publish two books. Whatever it is that you want, you can accomplish something really substantial in a decade that you almost certainly wouldn’t be able to accomplish in, say, three or even five years.

Live your life as if you were to die in ten years –  I think this is better advice than to “live your life as if you were to die tomorrow”. In a decade, you can achieve great things, but it does require you to be focused and determined. And it requires that you prioritize and make good plans. I suggest to ponder the following: if you would pass away in 10 years, what would you like to have achieved or leave behind? (brainstorm an unfiltered and unprioritized list)

One year is enough time for you to make three new friends or deepen your relationships with current friends or family – It gives you enough time to accomplish a lot in some areas, e.g., your personal relationships. However, if you were to get overly focused on what to accomplish in a yearly time frame, you might neglect other priorities that benefit from longer time frames. For example, the ten-year timeframe may be more suitable for thinking about your contribution and positive impact on the world. A year is not a sufficient amount of time to accomplish something really big and substantial, such as writing and publishing a book or building and going public with a company.

Longer-than-a-decade and lifetime goals are usually not helpful – You might wonder why I didn’t mention the option of having lifetime goals. In my view, the “lifetime” time horizon is too nebulous and not sufficiently actionable. And it doesn’t really engage the mind in any useful way for the purposes of goal-setting and planning compared to thinking on, say, a ten-year time horizon. Unlike “lifetime” or 15-year goals, a decade is a clearer time horizon. There are exceptions to the recommendation of not having lifetime goals. The most common one is your health. If you think you’re only going to live for another ten years, you probably won’t bother optimizing nutrition, and you may not care much about exercise. As such, you may neglect important actions on things that you truly care about; things that can become vivid and feel alive if you think of yourself and your goals on a lifetime time horizon. If you want to be able to pick up your grandkids and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, then thinking about a lifetime could be useful. So in the health domain, you may want to have lifetime goals. In other areas, a decade may be the most distant useful time horizon. Even for things such as having kids or finding a suitable romantic life partner, a ten-year time horizon is often appropriate. If you do want to think more about what you want on the timescale of your entire lifetime, one thing you might want to do is create visions for what you’d want your life to look like at a certain point in time. For example, you might vividly imagine and build up a mental picture of your life at age 80; how you feel, what your lifestyle is like, the people around you, and so on. 

Start with the most long-term goals – When diving into our discovery goal-setting session, start with the most long-term goals. Next, you select the next lower timescale and brainstorm goals for that. You repeat this process until you have goals for all desired timescales. If you’re new to multi-timescale goals, start with decade or yearly goals.

Discover from abundance – You want to select your final goals from a rich menu of possible goals. We tend to generate too few options before deciding. Consequently, we risk losing out on the very best options, as the best one might not be top-of-mind or obvious. You want to design a discovery experience that elicits a wide option space. You could enrich this further by asking others about their goals or what goals they might recommend to you.

Start with unstructured brainstorming for goals at selected timescales – Start by simply listing everything that comes to mind without filtering yourself. At this step, you capture all the possible goals you might set. You’ll worry about narrowing them down later, so at this step, you can truly let your imagination run wild. You can use a prompt such as “what do I want to achieve in the next [timescale]?”

This next paragraph describes a step that only makes sense if you have some life areas or life roles to work with, so if you don’t, you can skip it. 

Do structured brainstorming organized by life roles or life areas (i.e., your life ontology) – This is meant to be a follow-up step to the unstructured brainstorming you just did if you took that previous step. List all your life roles or life areas and populate them with any goals you currently have for each one, including the ideas generated in the previous step. Starting with the ones that have the fewest goals (or no goals at all), start adding ideas for those roles or areas brainstorm-style. Think about what you might want to achieve in each one. 

For yearly goals and longer time horizons, you probably want to have something in each life area or life role. For yearly goals in particular, it doesn’t have to be something big or demanding for all areas or roles, but it’s important that no area or role is completely empty. Stepping into the Internal Family Systems model for a moment, you can think of it this way: each life role or area represents a part of you that wants to be seen or heard somehow. By having at least a modest goal for each area, every part of you “feels heard,” and it helps you live a balanced life where the different areas of your life are relatively aligned. 

Consult any previous goals only after brainstorming – If you review previous goals, you will introduce path-dependent thinking and bias into your brainstorming. Be careful. Once you’ve finished your brainstorming, engaging with previous goals can be helpful. As you do, consider if you want to add any goals from your notes to the current set of possible goals. 

Select wisely

Optional: sharpen possible goals – Although we’ll get to the formulation step later, it can be useful to specify and clearly formulate your possible goals before you start narrowing them down to a shortlist. Fleshing out potential goals in greater detail helps you evaluate whether they might be worth pursuing and helps you understand what the goal would even be about. 

Decide on goal prioritization framework – The basic assumption is that you probably can’t achieve all the goals you’ve discovered in a given timeframe. So you need to prioritize the goals. There are two basic ways to do this

• Ranked list (vs. unranked list)
• Category-based lists
• Permutation of the two lists

Common ranked lists are TOP 3, 5, and 10. The rank from 1 to 10 indicates the priority of the goal. One prevalent categorical list system is must-have goals, nice-to-have, and will-not-have goals [Resource]. I personally use a variation of it: BIG/TOP 3, bonuses, and anti-goals.

Experiment with a framework – I recommend the BIG/TOP 3, bonuses, and anti-goals as the first experiment. The BIG 3 Goals are the goals that, when achieved, have the most significant impact on our lives or careers. They’re non-negotiable and require the bulk of our focus. For instance, securing a dream job, completing a marathon, or achieving a financial savings milestone. Every action or decision made should ideally contribute to these top-tier goals.

Bonuses can be a ranked or unranked list of goals. I have both lists depending on the timescale. They are the supplementary goals that enhance your life with joy, satisfaction, or comfort but aren’t crucial to your overall success. Bonuses introduce an element of flexibility and exploration into your goal-setting process, inviting you to pursue additional achievements without the weight of critical consequences.

Anti-goals are a critical component of my prioritization framework. Defining what you’re actively choosing to avoid is as important as knowing what you’re aiming for. Anti-goals outline what doesn’t serve your primary objectives, values, or well-being, acting as guardrails to keep you focused on what genuinely matters. By identifying these non-goals, you make it easier to decline projects, habits, or social engagements that don’t contribute positively to your life. This selective approach ensures your energies are invested in paths that align with your core priorities, enabling you to commit fully to the most meaningful aspects of your life and career.

Aim for one prioritized list of goals without categories – If you earlier brainstormed goals for different life categories, you might be confused if you should prioritize within the category (inter-prioritization goal) or between categories (intra-prioritization goal). To serve as clear guiding stars, the BIG3 are preferably intra-prioritized goals. However, it can be useful to rank the goals within a category (e.g., health or professional/personal) before creating the intra-prioritized list because it will be easier to prioritise amongst the top options within each category. 

Identify and align your BIG 3 on all timescales – It may seem hard to select the BIG 3. You can use prompts to make it easier. Ask yourself for the decade goals, “if I’d pass away in ten years and could only achieve one goal from the list, which one would it be?” Prompts like this emphasize the limited nature and help create a useful sense of urgency. This prompt is recommended primarily for creating your BIG 3 on the decadal time horizon. For goals on shorter timelines, you may want to use “if I could only select one goal from this list, which one would it be?” To continue exploring which goals to select, you can ask yourself, “A genie granted me exactly one more goal to be achieved, which one would it be?” In generating the third and final goal, you can ask yourself, “If I can only achieve one more goal for the [decade/year/quarter/week], what would the last goal be?” You could have different levels of priority for the BIG 3. The first two goals could be specific outcome goals and the third goal could be a more supportive process-oriented goal, such as “maintaining peak performance” or similar. As you break down your goals into shorter timescales, ensure that they are aligned with each other and mirror the priorities on the higher levels.

Managing bonuses deliberately – There are two key decisions related to structuring bonus goals. First, I recommend attempting to create a ranked list of bonuses, and when it turns out to be difficult to prioritize, stop it and leave the rest as an unranked list. Second, you might want to have a constraint on the number of bonus goals you want to actively maintain. This helps you achieve more of the bonus goals. 

Anticipate valuable anti-goals – One way to identify valuable anti-goals is by asking yourself, “which initiatives could come up that are interesting or tempting but not aligned with my BIG3?” or “what tempting yet unaligned activities might I be at risk of saying yes to?” This helps in crystallizing what might distract you from your central aims. It’s about recognizing that while certain opportunities or endeavors might seem appealing on the surface, they could lead you astray from your core path. For instance, if one of your BIG 3 is to enhance your professional skills in a specific area, an anti-goal might be to resist the temptation to take on projects that don’t contribute to this skillset, even if they promise short-term rewards or recognition. This discernment is crucial for maintaining focus and avoiding the dilution of your efforts.

Ensure realistic and achievable BIG 3s – These two components of the SMART(ER) goals framework are relevant for the selection and formulation. These two components help you maintain your sense of self-efficacy. It’s important to set goals that you’ll actually achieve so that you’ll want to continue setting goals. 

Ground realism in your past – I recommend that you don’t simply consult your gut feeling when asking yourself what you can reasonably do in e.g., a year or a week. You already have relevant data, even if you haven’t thought about it until now. To see this, ask yourself what you’ve been able to accomplish in the past on different time horizons. For example, looking at your calendar for the past quarter, what were you up to, and what did you manage to accomplish? That will give you an indication as to what is realistic and achievable for specific time horizons. 

Use external reference classes – Your past projects and endeavors won’t always be a reliable guide to predicting what you’ll be able to accomplish in the future. For example, if certain things have changed significantly about you or about your lifestyle, then you won’t always have a reference class from your own past experience to rely on. Suppose that you used to run marathons but developed a chronic knee injury. Obviously, that would mean that your past achievements in that area are no longer a useful guide for predicting future success in this area. 

If you don’t have a meaningful reference class in your own life history to draw from, then you can look up stories about other people achieving things that are similar to what you want to achieve and look at how long it took them. That way, you can build up a picture of how long such projects take in general and get an intuitive grasp of the relevant reference class. For example, if it took most authors (in some niche close to your interests) six months, on average, to write a book, then six months might be the starting point for you in thinking about how long it’s going to take for you to write your book. 

When trying to find a meaningful reference class for big goals, such as decade goals, you may also want to try and reverse-engineer the path to success in the examples you find in that reference class. If your goal is to build a company, you might want to research a few case studies from founders of successful companies and try to notice patterns in their steps to success (again, keeping in mind that you’ll be exposed almost exclusively to the ones who made it). 

Formulate skillfully

Minute details matter when it comes to formulating excellent goals. A few distinctions provide important practical value. 

Set SMART(ER) goals – While the five features of SMART goals are widely known, they are infrequently applied skillfully. There are different interpretations of the acronym. I often use the following SMART(ER) goals framework. Here’s how I understand each component of the framework:

S: specific: is it sufficiently clear what the goal is about?

M: measurable: can you easily tell if the goal has been achieved?

A: actionable: can you derive clear actions from the goal?

R: realistic: how likely is it going to be achieved at the deadline?

T: timed: by when does it have to be accomplished?

E: evaluated (or tracked): will you be able to track and evaluate progress towards the goal?

R: rewarding; readjust/revise: how will you reward yourself for achieving it? How could you readjust the goal if needed?

Qualities of goals over acronyms – SMARTER is merely a string of different adjectives that you should use to evaluate your goals against. The main lesson is to evaluate the goals we formulated based on deliberately selected features. Goal frameworks are proposals for important feature sets. The ideal set of criteria will always depend on the context of the goal. For example, one might criticise the SMART goal framework for not prompting the formulation of goals that are motivating. As such, you may want to add a component called “inspirational” and make it SMARTI, change the M from “measurable” to “motivational”, or declare that it M encompasses both. Ultimately, you have the agency to decide what and how many adjectives you want to use. It is useful to experiment with different criteria to calibrate your ability to match those with different goal contexts. 

Prefer approach- over avoidance-focused goals – Approach goals are those that are oriented towards achieving a positive outcome or state. They’re about moving toward what you desire, such as “becoming more physically active” or “cultivating a sense of peace and calm.” These goals are inherently motivating because they focus on the acquisition of positive experiences or qualities, painting a picture of what you’re striving to achieve. The forward momentum they create is fueled by the anticipation of positive outcomes, making the journey toward them inherently rewarding. In contrast, avoidance goals are framed around evading negative outcomes or states, such as “not being sedentary” or “avoiding stress.” While these goals might stem from a genuine desire for improvement, their negative framing focuses on what you’re trying to escape rather than what you’re working to gain. This focus on the negative can be less motivating because it’s driven by fear of undesired outcomes rather than the pursuit of desired ones. Additionally, avoidance goals can sometimes lack clarity in terms of the positive state or outcome you’re ultimately aiming to achieve. If you find yourself setting avoidance goals, try to reframe them into approach goals. Ask yourself, “What positive outcome am I seeking?” This reframing process can illuminate the path forward, making your goals more inspiring and actionable. Ultimately, we could add positive or approach-focused to our checklist list of adjectives for excellent goals.

Explore the ambition space – While SMART suggest that realism is important, other people push for goals to be ambitious and possibly unrealistic. Wisdom enables us to know how to balance ambition with realism and when to favor one over the other. This requires experience, self-reflection, and contextual calibration. Aim too low, and you risk opportunities for development. Aim too high, and you might face repeated failures that could reduce your self-efficacy. It is useful to explore different levels of ambition to calibrate ourselves. Especially for annual and decade goals, you may want to have at least three different levels of ambition for each

• Realistic: You can very likely achieve this based on similar achievements in the past (e.g., grow your YouTube following to 1000 subscribers in a year) 
• Hard more: This might not be in your direct reference class of achievement, but there have been a considerable amount of people who achieved it with smart and hard work (e.g., growing your following to 1 million in a year)
• Moonshots (10X): A handful to a dozen people in history have achieved this (e.g., being a professor at age 18)

Moonshots make the most sense on longer timescales. You can watch this video about moonshot thinking from Google’s “Captain of Moonshots”. It’s more difficult to go for moonshots on shorter timelines. However, there are frameworks that try to do that, such as the 5-day sprint from Google Ventures. 

There are different approaches to raising ambition: 

• Shorten the timeline: you might change the goal of solving AI alignment from ten to five years 
• All-in on one goal: It helps to ask yourself what a maxed-out or all-in version of the goal would look like
• 10X the realistic goal: You can prompt yourself to imagine a 10X version of the current goal to find a moonshot

Three levels usually work well, but you could, of course, have more levels. 

Ambitious goals, as opposed to merely realistic ones, stretch us to innovate in our planning and execution. They encourage us to cultivate courage and creativity by moving outside of our comfort zone and taking calculated risks with outside-the-box plans and actions. Realistic goals can make us more successful in the short run, while ambitious goals can lead to more success in the long run with the right psychology due to increased character and skill growth.

Break down long-term goals

If your goal is to win the Turing Award in five years, then you will need to have a grand plan with sub-goals (or milestones) and sub-plans for each. If your goal is to do eight deep work hours tomorrow, you can specify actions that help you achieve that more straightforwardly (e.g., schedule co-working, block social media, etc.). We need to break down our skillfully formulated (non-trivial) long-term goals into more digestible medium- and short-term goals to craft robust plans. As you formulate sub-goals, you want to use best practices explained in the previous section. This network of goals will considerably increase our probability of achieving them. For example, if your long-term goal is to be financially independent a decade from now, you will be much more likely to succeed if you specify the medium- and short-term goals  (e.g., annual savings of 20k with a 10% increase per year and monthly savings goal of 1.7k) and formulate a tailored action plan for these (e.g., list all your monthly and year expenses and start tracking them). 

How far do we need to break down our goals? Well, it depends. One stop-condition would be the point when you feel confident and empowered to design effective plans. You might want to view the different time scales as different levels of goals, where your most long-term goals are the highest level (e.g., decade or annual), and the other levels are different sub-goals (e.g., quarterly, weekly, and daily). For example, if your annual goal is to find a highly compatible partner, you could ask yourself what needs to reliably happen on a weekly basis in order to achieve this (e.g., going on one carefully selected date per week). If your goal was to build a successful software company, some of the sub-goals might be about designing a prototype, collecting feedback on the prototype with actual users, and many more.

Focus on the meaning to avoid terminological confusion – G&P can be confusing because of the abundance of different word combos that point towards similar distinctions. The following common distinctions are important to be aware of

• Calendar time: decade, half-decade, annual goals etc.
• Vague time: lifetime, long-term, medium-term, and short-term goals
• Outcome vs. process goals
• Lag vs. lead goals
• Objective vs. key results

One shared implicit reason for the distinctions is that our influence differs across goals. This usually correlates to the extent to which they are in the future and the effort their achievement requires. I’ll focus on the last three distinctions. 

While outcome goals are goals that specify a tangible achievement in the world (e.g., winning the Nobel Prize or publishing an article), process goals are goals that focus on the execution of specific behaviours (e.g., a certain number of deep work hours per day). Process goals tend to be much more in our control than outcome goals.

Lag goals are goals that are only achieved through sustained performance of lead actions, while lead goals are goals focused on actions and behaviours that, if achieved, should lead to the lag goals. They are called “lead” because they lead to the desired outcomes and can be measured and adjusted in real-time (e.g., daily number of sales calls, daily caloric deficit, or daily hours worked). Lag goals can only be measured after the activities that lead to them have been completed (e.g., annual revenue, weight loss, or books published). Lead goals are about doing the right things (processes and actions), while lag goals are about getting the right results (outcomes and achievements). The distinction is relatively similar to the outcome and process and could be collapsed. The lag and lead distinction has a stronger emphasis on a casual reasoning chain between the goals (i.e., lead goals lead to lag goals), while the relationship between process and outcome goals can be seen more loosely. It relates more to the old-age question of what we should focus on – the process/journey or the outcome/destination. I believe the answer is to reject the dichotomy and focus on both. However, as a coach, I might give contradictory advice and suggest someone focus more on the process than the outcome and another one might receive the exact opposite advice. Favouring the side you systematically neglect is necessary if the goal is a well-calibrated perspective. 

The third popular distinction worth discussing is the one between objective and key results (OKRs). An objective is a significant, concrete, clearly defined goal, and key results are 3–5 measurable success criteria used to track the achievement of that goal. Ultimately, it appears to me that different pairs of words are used to point towards the same semantic distinction. I’d prefer the more intuitive and less cognitive effortful language of lag and lead goals over objective and key results. 

In the organizational context, there are two other popular concepts: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and “scorecards”. In essence, these are again only different terms for the same basic semantic core: differentiating between the goals we aim for and the actions we take to get there.

The most helpful deconfusion comes when you remember the principle of form follows function. All these conceptual distinctions are forms, and we should see them as mental instruments that should help us manifest the future we want. We should modify and use them in the way that most effectively serves the achievement of our goals. 

Craft robust plans

While goals describe where you want to go, plans capture how you will get there. Breaking down goals could be seen as part of the planning process because you formulate a theory of how reaching your shorter-term goals will lead to achieving your long-term goals. The extent to which a plan is good or bad depends on the extent it helps you effectively reach the goal. If you have set lag and lead goals for the year, then you want to specify plans, actions, and structures that help you achieve those goals. 

Prepare for the scenario that things often don’t go according to plan – Consider what obstacles might get in the way. Then think about what you might do to get around them. This kind of preparation can help make you more resilient when facing setbacks. It can also make your plans more robust. You can apply this anticipation-of-obstacles thinking to your goals as well as the sub-goals within them. Ideally, you’ll end up with a list of potential obstacles to your goals, which then helps you generate ideas for ways around those obstacles. 

For example, one obstacle might be, “crap, I’m likely to want to start binge-watching this new Anime TV show during the evenings and go to bed too late”. Having identified this potential obstacle, you’ve made progress! You can now explore solutions. Specifically, you might install an app blocker or make a high-level decision such as “I’m just not going to watch Anime for a year because these other things are so important to me. Instead, I’ll do [some other thing you like] for pleasure and relaxation in the meantime.” 

As you look at your plan, you can get an intuitive assessment of your confidence in your plan, by asking yourself what your credence level is that the plan will work (i.e., in percentage terms, how confident are you?). Or you can ask yourself how surprised you’d be if the plan wouldn’t work out, on a scale from 1-10, with higher numbers indicating plan robustness. These plan checks might work especially well for weekly goals. 

You can get information about the accuracy of your plans and estimated competition times by regularly doing reviews to gauge the difference between the allotted time to complete a goal and the time actually spent. This can help hone your intuitions about how long it will take you to complete different kinds of goals. 

Use “anti-goals” to actively deprioritize less important things – I encourage you to actively deprioritize some goals or activities by having “anti-goals” or “no-goals”. This means consciously deciding that there are certain things you just won’t do for now (or will only do for a certain limited amount of time each week). This practice helps you appreciate that nothing is for free and that, for many things, you’ll have to pay a price to get what you want. For example, some anti-goals might be “only up to two hours of video gaming per week” or “no video gaming for the next three months”. One of the big challenges of goal-setting is to say “no” to enticing opportunities that distract you from your goal. That’s where anti-goals can help. And you can still satisfy the part of you that wants the things you’re actively deprioritizing, e.g., by deciding that you’ll get back to those things next year or next month. For example, “once I’ve finished my book draft, I can once again allow myself to play video games during evenings.”

Evaluate & adjust continously

We’ve now extensively covered the different characteristics of good goals. Another important part of goal-setting is to routinely review and evaluate your goals and the progress you’ve made. 

For one, this will help you notice when a goal needs updating. Goals are not meant to be updated frequently. Having said that, it’s very important to allow yourself to change or even remove goals when they no longer serve you. It’s really bad to keep pursuing a goal you don’t truly want (anymore) or wouldn’t benefit from. Scheduling reviews, e.g., once per year and once per quarter, can provide you with such an opportunity to update your goals. 

Just keep your motivation in mind: when you’re thinking about dropping a goal, is it because you’re currently finding it hard to work on or because you don’t care about it after all? Or perhaps you learned something new about yourself or the world since you first formed the goal? Your motivations can provide clues for how to go about changing your goal (or whether to keep it after all). 

On a practical note, whatever (software-based) system you’ll use for keeping track of your goals, it is advisable to have a changelog. That way, you can track the evolution of your thinking, including how your desires have changed over time.

Reward generously

It’s important to reward ourselves for accomplishing our goals. We need to feel good about our G&P system, or we’re going to lose motivation, which would be unfortunate! 

If you feel resentment or aversion, then start by addressing that. Investigate this before you start actually setting goals. If there’s aversion or resentment, it’s probably because you’ve had bad experiences setting goals; maybe you set goals that you didn’t achieve because they were unrealistically ambitious in scope. 

Investigate your attitude, feelings, and beliefs regarding goals. See if you can understand what feels bad about goal-setting and what, if anything, feels potentially exciting about goals. See if you can disentangle the positive aspects from the ones that are painful. Consider how the negative associations with goal-setting may have been formed, for example, experiences that made you feel like a failure for not meeting your goals. 

If you have negative associations with goals and want to start setting goals right away (before investigating the cause of the bad feelings), it’s really important to take an MVP approach to your G&P system. If you aim higher than that, you risk failing and then feeling even more discouraged. Your goal, at this stage, is to feel good about your system. So start with small, easily achievable goals and pay attention to how it feels when achieving them. These goals should still aim at something you care about; don’t set a goal of counting fifty blades of grass in the nearby park just for the practice of setting goals. You can select something small and manageable that still feels meaningful, such as “do five jumping jacks for exercise today”. 

Once you’ve experienced the joy of setting and accomplishing some meaningful goals, you can then shift your focus towards becoming better at setting and achieving more ambitious goals.

People seem to often associate rewards with snacking or eating something delicious. However, we can think of a reward as anything that makes us feel good that gets paired with goal-relevant action. If it’s simply thinking of some pleasant thoughts or bringing a happy memory to mind, then that might work as a reward for us. For bigger goals, we’ll want to have bigger rewards. Finishing your PhD calls for a bigger treat than going to the gym this afternoon. 

Implementing the process

Having covered the process of goal-setting, we’ll turn to questions related to formatting your goals for maximal benefit as well as which systems and tools to use. 

Store properly 

It is important to have a functional digital knowledge management system that supports all the mentioned functions and steps. 

Visibility is an important feature of the goal system. For example, more visible your goal are, the more they will inform your day-to-day cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. It can be increased in different ways

• Physical: Writing them on something physical (e.g., magnetic whiteboard paper)
• Digital: Put the BIG3 goals on your calendar 

While the influence might diminish over time as we become less attentive, it is still significantly better compared to not having any. It might not be necessary to counter this if you have a strong engagement and integration of them into several workflows (e.g., asking yourself daily about how you made progress towards your BIG1). However, if you want to reconnect with them, I suggest to occasionally do any of the following: 

• Read them every other day actively
• Imagine how it would feel to achieve them
• Record a voice note to a friend why the goals are important
• Add something new and fun to it (e.g., small drawings on the whiteboard)

Enagement and integration. It is essentially that our G&P is integrated into other workflows and systems

increase the likelihood that you will keep your goals in mind over time and keep reflecting on them. Basically, it helps you avoid the all-too-common problem of writing a list of goals in a moment of excitement, only to put them in a drawer somewhere and forget all about them.

One approach would be to simply have a list of your goals, perhaps organized by life role or life area. 

A step up in complexity would be to create space to add potential “bonuses” (i.e., things you do that exceed your expectations). Getting granular, if you add life roles (or life areas), you could do that in brackets next to each goal, so you’re always reminded of the purpose of a given goal. This would allow you to connect an aspirational identity to each goal.

Example formatting: 

• Goal #1 [associated life role/area]

Certain software applications allow for collapsable lists, which is useful for nesting sub-goals, life roles, etc indented beneath each goal. This is an easy way of creating a simple overview (by not expanding the lists) while also easily allowing you to view the relevant details associated with each goal (by expanding the list). This may sound very granular and mundane, but you may be surprised by how useful this is if you haven’t tried it!

You may also want to have a table-based overview of your goals. One tool that is helpful for this is AirTable. And it has more functionalities than a spreadsheet. Although a spreadsheet may work just fine. 

Tips for staying focused and motivated

You don’t have to go about it alone – You may want to enlist a friend for co-working and accountability or work with a coach who can help you set and reach goals. Talking through your ideas about goals with someone supportive and helpful helps you clarify your thinking and notice obstacles. 

Tie yourself to the mast – You can also set up a system that will penalize you financially if you don’t meet a particular goal by a certain time. For example, a setup that will pay out $500 to a cause or political party you hate if you fail to meet your goal. 

Your goals need to resonate with you and feel meaningful – One failure mode I’ve observed in people setting goals is that they sometimes become disconnected from them. This can happen if someone only has yearly goals and has not really reflected deeply on what these yearly goals represent to them or how they connect to their values or life roles (or life areas). This is where the measurability aspect of SMART(ER) goals framework can sometimes be detrimental because the precision it provides can be an excuse not to think deeply about whether the goal is meaningful. So I’d encourage you to watch out for this failure mode and not be deceived by the allure of precision!

Have alignment between goals on different timescales – Another failure mode is when people only look routinely at their monthly or weekly goals but rarely (if ever) review their annual and decade goals. That way, you lose perspective, in part, because you don’t get to see how your nearer-term goals connect and move you towards your longer-term goals. You also lose out on valuable opportunities for your weekly or monthly goals to be informed by those longer-term goals. Finally, if you only regularly review your weekly goals, you may lose motivation by forgetting why you’re pursuing these weekly goals in the first place. 

Summary

We’ve come to the end of this article on goal-setting. I’ll briefly recap what I hope to have shown you along the way. 

It’s well-worth learning how to set, pursue and meet goals because it’s a robustly useful meta-skill that will serve us well no matter what we want to do with our lives. 

Think of a goal as an observable desired state in the future that causes you to act differently in the present to realize it.

Think carefully about what goals you select and the plans you implement in order to meet them, as there are many benefits to goal-setting but also potential harms. 

Goal-setting is a skill so don’t expect yourself to simply get it right away. Check your mindset towards goals, and if you have negative associations, then make it your first goal to feel good about having goals in the first place. 

I recommend having goals on multiple timescales: decadal, annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly (and daily).

You may want to develop your unique goal-setting psychology so you can personalize advice and decide what advice applies to you (such as the advice given in this article). 

Use a process to set goals. Most likely, you’ll benefit from going through the six steps outlined earlier. Use some sort of system to keep track of and review your goals. 

Do what you can to stay motivated and focused. 

Watch your life change as you meet one meaningful goal after another.