#42: Reviewing Personal Goals and What I've Learned
Last week, I shared part one of this post, which focused on getting started for setting personal goals.
Part two goes into my process for reviewing and reflecting on goals, and what I’ve learned from the process.
Reviewing and Reflecting - Quarterly
Review progress against my goals on a quarterly basis
Each quarter I take the five categories I’ve divided my goals and intentions into, and I group them into one of the following three sections:
What Went Well?
What Could Be Improved?
What Didn’t Go Well?
These three sections might be familiar to you if you’ve ever done any kind of retrospective in the workplace. A review of personal goals is no different. The purpose of this exercise is to analyze and grade my performance for each category based on how many goals and intentions are in each section.
If there are few things in the What Didn’t Go Well? section, or a number of things in the What Went Well? section, that’s an indicator of a good quarter. In reality, most of the time, there’s balance across categories, including a majority in the What Could be Improved? section. For me, that means I’ve made progress against that goal or intention to some degree, but there’s an opportunity to think about setting a new goal or intention in the upcoming quarter to level up. Reviewing in this way lets me celebrate small and big wins, push myself to strive for more in upcoming quarters, and reflect on why I didn’t meet all my goals.
Here’s a condensed example of my Work category in Q1. (G) represents a goal and (I) represents an intention.
What went well?
Putting time and energy into a new passion project / venture (I)
Mentoring Michigan students and Aspiring Product Managers (I)
Speak directly and speak my mind more consistently (I)
Developing genuine work friendships (I)
What could be improved?
Snoozing notifications and Slacks after-hours (I)
Seek less validation from others; focus on what you believe is best (I)
What didn’t go well?
Working a more reasonable schedule weekly (I)
Recording weekly achievements in Slack (G)
Tutoring High school and/or college students (I)
Summarize and grade myself against my goals
Once I review all my categories and break down my goals and intentions for each into these three sections, I give myself a grade from A to F for each category based on the results of the above breakdown. Then I summarize the overall quarter in a few sentences. This summary allows me to look back at the quarter and put it into perspective. In Q1, this was my summary:
I did well on a lot of the reduction goals, which means that I am finding it easier to set a goal to reduce something and cut that down.
However, I am not doing well with starting new things that I want to. My actions are cutting back, but I am still feeling the inertia of pushing through to start something new.
I need to focus more on starting new things in Q2 and maybe that means starting small. And focusing less mental effort on improving or continuing what’s working as I will naturally get better at those over time, as long as I am intentional about them.
Identify what I want to start doing, continue doing, and stop doing
As I referenced in part one, I like to use some version of the Start/Continue/Stop framework. By doing this, I am able to divide my goals and intentions in a way that relates closely to my review format of Went Well/Didn’t Go Well/Could be Improved.
Based on my quarterly retrospective, I can start filling out the following sections:
Start doing
Keep doing or improve
Reduce or stop doing
If things went well, I likely want to continue doing them or level up and improve. Is this something I want to try again? Then I likely put it in the keep doing or improve bucket.
Or is this something I failed to do altogether, but want to focus my time on doing in the coming months? Then I likely put that in the start doing bucket.
If things didn’t go well, I have an opportunity to reflect. Is this something I should give up on? Was I being too optimistic? If so, I can place these in the stop doing.
Or if it’s something that went well, but it’s a bad habit, then I might place it in the reduce or stop doing section.
Here’s a snippet of my health goals and intentions for Q2:
Start doing
Sleep 7-8 hours daily (G)
Gratitude journal 1x a week (G)
Start eating healthier (I)
Read for 30 mins before sleep (G)
Keep doing or improve
Meditate 5x a week (G)
Intentionally eat vegetarian meals 2 days a week (G)
Reduce or stop doing
alcoholic drinks per week to less than 3 (G)
Screen time late night and early morning (I)
Eating very spicy food (I)
Rinse, Repeat - Quarterly
Set specific goals against what I want to start and continue doing
Once I’ve gone through the above steps, I go through the process again for the next quarter. I revise any items that I want to start and continue doing into measurable and specific goals. I then add on any goals and intentions that weren’t part of my last quarter, but are things I want to start tracking.
Create a theme for the next quarter and align high-level outcomes
Once I have a list of my goals and intentions for the quarter, I will summarize them around a single theme or motto. And then using this motto, I create a set of high-level outcomes I want to achieve. This makes it easy to align specific goals and intentions as results of those outcomes.
For example, in Q2 of this year, I aligned around the following outcomes:
Optimize for things that make you more productive
Do things that excite you / drive your curiosity
Continue doing things to improve your mental health
While I outlined specific goals and intentions within each of these outcomes, these served as drivers for my personal life. Even if all else failed, I felt if I could keep these ideas top of mind and make progress towards them, I would consider it a success.
Reviewing and Reflecting - Annually
Do a year-end review with grades for my goals
Similar to my quarterly reviews, at the end of the year, I do a review of all of the goals I set for the year. In practice, I take every goal and intention and line it up as a bullet point. I then group them into grades or tiers that loosely follow the below:
As/Bs: ones that I did well on
Cs: ones that were average or could be improved
Ds/Fs: ones that I missed
This gives me an overall breakdown of how I did when I reflect at the end of a year. It also helps remind me of wins I may have had earlier in the year that I may have forgotten.
Outline highlights and accomplishments
Once I’ve bucketed each goal and intention into a grade, I list out the major accomplishments and highlights from the year. Often these are the goals graded as As, but also a set of highlights I collected as I reflected on the overall year. These could be major wins, small wins, milestones, or themes that may have been hard to measure over a single quarter, but are clearly improved over the course of a year.
A few examples from this past year:
Further solidified many of my friendships
Generally got more comfortable with being extroverted
Fantasy Football champion (I can win with commitment)
Found a new apartment and started living alone
Started a new job and found one that I genuinely enjoy
Summarize the year in a paragraph
This all leads up to a single paragraph, which gives me a way to reflect on the positives and areas to improve for the entire year. The purpose of this is to use these paragraphs as a summary of a year over time. My dream is that in ten years time, rather than having to read through each and every goal of 2023, I can read a quick summary and remember the changes I made in that year. Below was my summary in my 2022 year-end review.
I was generally happier this year. I think a large part of this came from self-discovery. I realized I need a job that pays me well, and that motivates me, but that doesn’t take over my life and burn me out. I also let myself be okay with missing things (working out, writing) and focused on inner happiness. This upcoming year I want to double down on some things that can continue to help me grow and cut out some of the things that I still don’t genuinely LOVE.
Rinse, Repeat - Annually
Set personal goals and intentions for the upcoming year
Once the year is over, the exercise starts all over again. The beginning of the year is often the hardest because I am doing a quarterly review, a full-year review, a new year’s goal setting, and a new quarter’s goal setting. I usually give myself additional time for this exercise in the beginning of the year, but then it becomes more straightforward in the later quarters of the year.
Review my life mission statement
I like to also use the beginning of the year as a way to reflect on my life mission statement. Each year I can tweak it, add to it, or revise it altogether. It’s an opportunity to ensure that my life goals are still aligned around this statement, and at the very least a chance to remind myself of the big picture.
What I’ve Learned
In going through this exercise for over a year now, I’ve learned a great deal about both myself and the process itself. Below are my five biggest takeaways:
Setting yearly goals and breaking them into quarterly goals makes things more achievable. In part one, I mentioned that I would often overwhelm myself with too many goals out of the gate. By starting with the yearly picture but breaking it into quarters, I am able to focus on building habits quarter by quarter. I’ve found by the end of the year, in sum, I am able to accomplish much more.
Writing things down makes a huge difference in achieving what I aim to do. By having a central, single place to review and revisit goals, it makes it easier to hold myself accountable to what I want to achieve. Even if I am missing or not accomplishing what I want to, by having it in writing, it creates a sense of guilt and pressure to live up to the standard I held for myself. And this works wonders for someone like me.
Putting in the time is hard. As you can see from these two posts, this is not a simple exercise by any means. Like many things in life, if it weren’t difficult, everyone would do it. The barrier to entry means that only those of us who are willing to put in the time and effort reap the rewards. But I can confidently say the benefits are worth it.
Discipline and commitment is 90% of the challenge. Most of us, including myself, are extrinsically motivated. This leads to a problem when doing exercises to better yourself, because there is no real outside reward or benefit, or at least it’s not clearly visible. The tricks that work for me are setting up scheduled time in my calendar, and blocking off distractions during this exercise. I may be extreme but that means no notifications, putting my phone in a different room, and having a single tab open while I write. I’ve found this helps immensely with my discipline.
The biggest learning comes from doing. Regardless of what setup you have or how much planning you do, the real learning is going to come from taking action. Writing goals and intentions is a great first step. But if you don’t act on those goals, it doesn’t matter how perfect your plan is, the value you get is going to be minimal. If you can figure out a goal setting and review plan that is going to enable action, that’s the most impactful thing you can do.