Before I jump into this week’s post, I’d love to get some feedback from all of you—my most loyal readers. If there have been particular posts you’ve enjoyed over the last few months, I would love to know! And if there are topics or ideas you’d like me to cover, please let me know. I will continue to write about what interests me, but I also aim to make this newsletter valuable for all of you. I appreciate everyone who has given me feedback already. On to this week’s post.
One of the most common pieces of advice written about in self-improvement books is the practice of setting goals for your personal life. On the surface, this seems easy. You’ve probably considered doing this at some point in your life, whether on a birthday, around New Year’s Day, or during a midlife crisis.
From conversations with my friends, I’ve found that while most people aspire to do this, and know they would find value from it, most find it difficult to actually get started and put goal setting into action.
Given that it’s now July, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking around my own goals from this year and my progress towards them.
In this week’s two-part post, I want to share my strategy for setting personal goals, how I review them, and what I’ve learned from my current process.
Part One outlines my process and goes into detail on how you can get started today. I hope you find it useful.
At a high level, here’s the process I’ve been following over the past year:
Getting Started
Create a life mission statement
Identify categories of goals that you value
Set personal goals and intentions for the year
Set an overall theme for the quarter
Reviewing and Reflecting
Quarterly:
Review progress against my goals on a quarterly basis
Identify what I want to start doing, continue doing, and stop doing
Summarize and grade myself against my goals
Annually:
Do a year-end review with grades for my goals
Outline highlights and accomplishments
Summarize the year in a paragraph
Rinse, Repeat
Quarterly:
Create a theme for the next quarter and align high-level outcomes
Set specific goals against what I want to start and continue doing
Annually:
Set personal goals and intentions for the upcoming year
Review my life mission statement
This post goes into detail with examples on each of the bullets within the Getting Started section. This should help make it clear how I’ve put this process into practice, and how you can do the same.
Getting Started
Create a life mission statement
Creating a life mission statement is something I was inspired to do after reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I talked about in greater detail in a previous post. The mission statement is an opportunity to determine how I want to guide everything in my life.
I’ve shared my life mission statement before, which is:
To raise the aspirations, life satisfaction, and success bar for the people around me.
I can’t emphasize enough that it can take time to determine this mission statement. I would not rush this exercise. It probably took me a good six months to figure out my life mission, and I still adapt it every so often.
Doing every other step in the process became far easier once I accomplished this, but it’s arguably the hardest of the steps to complete. The good thing is it’s not written in stone. It’s why I review this mission statement every year (more to come on that in part two).
Identify categories of goals that you value
I used to make a number of mistakes when attempting to set goals. One was not writing them down. As covered last week, when you write something down, you are more likely to follow through on it. Now I write my goals in a Google Doc so there’s a record that I can reference at any time.
Another mistake I’d make was that I would set a bunch of goals without any organization or structure to them. This would lead to me feeling overwhelmed, and when I felt overwhelmed, I was less likely to accomplish anything I set out to do.
Instead, what I’ve found helpful is breaking down my goals into specific categories. These categories should loosely be tied to your life mission statement.
In my case, I ask myself what categories drive my overall life satisfaction? If I increase my life satisfaction, that will enable me to help raise the aspirations of others. The categories I ended up with were:
Relationships (Friends, Family, Romantic)
Health (Physical and Mental)
Work (Day-to-day job, but also passion projects)
NYC (What I aim to do in the city)
Personal (Catch-all for personality, self-improvement, life habits, etc.)
I’ve found these five categories provide a semblance of order to all my goals and intentions without getting too nitty-gritty. Your categories may vary, but I would highly recommend determining buckets for your personal goals.
Set personal goals and intentions for the year
Once I have my categories, I start listing out goals and intentions aligned to those categories. I define a goal as something that is easy to measure in a quantitative fashion, whereas intentions is something more directional and qualitative.
For example, one of my goals for this year in the Relationships category is to talk to or text my grandma at least twice a month. This is clearly measurable, which makes it easy to review later in the year, and to evaluate if I am on track.
On the other hand, one of my intentions is to put myself in more situations where I can be extroverted and connect w/ others. This is harder to measure and is more relative, but it still gives me a directional path for how to achieve success.
I start with a time period like a year so that I can be forward-thinking. I’ve found a year is a good starting point because it’s easy to contextualize, it allows room for improvement and feedback over time, and it isn’t so far in the future that it isn’t actionable immediately.
I like to use some version of a Start/Continue/Stop framework. I’ll go into this in more detail in the Reviewing and Reflection section in part two, but I find it helpful to separate goals and intentions that are brand new from ones that I have already been doing.
I also find it helpful to document what I want to stop doing. Goals don’t always need to be written in a positive manner; often reducing bad habits is even harder to accomplish. It’s important for me to list out things I aim to reduce doing. Otherwise I have a tendency to pile on new goals without finding added time to fit them in.
Set an overall theme for the quarter
The purpose of setting an overall theme is so that your goals and intentions can be summarized into a single phrase or two. If you’re like me, and you like to set many lofty goals, it can be hard to keep track day in and day out.
For the first quarter of this year, my overall theme was Stay locked in, disciplined, but try your best. In practice, this really aimed to emphasize two things.
One was discipline. I had historically struggled with being consistent with activities I’d pick up. I wanted to do a better job of saying no to distractions to focus on what I wanted to achieve.
Two was balance. As I had mentioned in a previous post, burnout was something I had suffered from in the past. I wanted to make sure that even while I stayed disciplined, I wasn’t overcompensating by staying in too often, not hanging out with friends and family, or working too hard where I would lose sight of my mental health.
As you can see, even this single-lined theme related directly to every single one of the five categories I aligned my goals and intentions around. More importantly, this theme would act as a reminder when I’m making decisions day-to-day. When I would be at a crossroads, I would ask myself what should I do right now given I want to stay disciplined and locked in? This made decisions much easier, and this helped me reduce my tendency to succumb to peer pressure when it wasn’t what I wanted to do deep down.
Part Two (coming later this week!) covers how I review my goals and intentions, and what I’ve learned from the process. Stay tuned!
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Hi Nikil, I definitely agree with you that writing goals down and grouping them into themes make them feel a lot more attainable! The act of writing goals down makes it feel like a contract, and being able to group goals into just one word makes it feel a lot simpler!
I also personally like joining groups of like-minded people to help achieve my personal goals. For example, a book club, writing group, fitness class, etc. But it could also be as simple as a Self-Care Discord Server, where we all post our goals and daily progresses. We hold each other accountable!