The goal of goals (& other notes on your future self)

It’s goal time y’all. If you’re thinking of setting goals for 2024 I encourage you to write a rough draft down ahead of January. People love to laugh at New Year's resolutions, but the fresh start effect is a real thing (Google it) and we can achieve great things by taking advantage of our brain’s built in mechanisms to kick us into gear. Why not try?

The best goals, as the internet will happily tell us, are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (aka SMART). A certain Vancouver-based stretchy pant company likes to call these commitments “by-whens” as in “who is going to do what by when?” This degree of specificity can be very effective when targets are clear, and we generally accomplish more when the goals are sharply defined. It’s a good idea if you want to be productive. 

The risk of this specificity is that we turn our goals into yet another to-do list that requires us to spend our lives worshiping at the altar of “productivity.” Most of us already spend our work lives striving to do as many things as we can, as efficiently as possible. Now we’ve voluntarily made a list of more stuff to do after we punch out? Is life just one long productivity contest until we eventually tick “casket” off our list? Ehh I’m not so sure. I think this “productivity fatigue” is one reason many NYE resolutions don’t happen. The last thing I want to do after doing things at work all day is come home and do more things. 

That’s fine, because what our personal goals are really after is not accomplishment or productivity, but change. We set goals because we want to make meaningful & lasting changes that will help us lead more fulfilling & satisfying lives. We want change not just in what we do, but more deeply in who we are. The point of my running goal (a few years back) was not really just to run 3000km in a year, it was to become the kind of person who prioritizes fitness & does so consistently.

What this suggests is that SMART goals, while immensely helpful, are only ever going to be waypoints or milestones on the way to becoming the people we want to be. That’s a bigger thought, and requires some reflection on the people we are already becoming, as well as the kind of people we would like to become. Then our goals can act as vectors to help us move in that direction (in whatever degree of SMART-ness we are comfortable with). My goal of “ski 20+ days this season” can then be a milestone on the way to “becoming someone who prioritizes time in the mountains” which is what I really want to cultivate this year.

But that’s only half the battle. It’s been said that “the human default is sleepwalking.” Once the fresh start high of January wears off, many of us will go back to sleep, pulled back to our pre-existing lives by inertia. This is normal, and I think what it means is that we operate best when we alternate between autopilot & change much the way we do literal sleeping & waking. We can’t always be pushing on everything, that’s a recipe for burnout. But fall asleep for too long and we risk sliding into a corner or ending up somewhere we didn’t intend. 

Falling asleep is going to happen, that’s fine. But what we need is something to wake us up without relying on the randomness of life events to do it for us. This is the real purpose of the “by when” in our goals, to keep us paying attention to the change we are looking for. We also need a cadence of reflection, to make sure that we are not blindly checking things off the to-do list, but that we are actually changing and becoming the people we want to be. 

For me, that means considering some reminders:

• The purpose of goals is to help us become the kind of people we want to become, not just to check some things off another to-do list. They’re about creating milestones on the way to our future selves. This change matters much more than how many things we did in a twelve month period. 

• It’s fine if not every goal is perfectly SMART. It might even be preferable to have some vagueness, and we should have an idea of what achieving them means for the kind of person we want to become (eg the goal behind the goal). Check out this piece on “fuzzy” goals as well. 

• The cadence at which we check in on our goals (daily, monthly, whatever) is equally important as the goals themselves, and is most effective as a reflective practice more than a measurement practice. I keep a daily-ish journaling practice, a monthly check-in, and a quarterly review. These go in my Google Calendar (they won’t happen otherwise). 

Your process does matter, but what matters most is that it works for you. Systems take us much further than raw willpower, and don’t require motivation. Get curious, be thoughtful, and design a system to support the person you want to become. You deserve it.

Hurry slowly,

Matt