Sustainable Goal Setting
Begin With the End in Mind When Setting Sustainable goals
This is one of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People according to Stephen Covey in his coveted book of the same name (Hint: this is on my Top Ten Essential Reading List for FIRE.) Reverse Engineer your life. This step does not need to be realistic. In fact, I encourage you to be a bit unrealistic. And why not, you are the creator and master designer of your future.
“Don’t take life too serious, no one gets out alive.”
– Unknown
Vision
Envision what you would consider wild success in your life. What does that look like? Where in the world would you live? What does your home look like? What do you do all day? Who are you with? Who do you know? Who knows you? What are you known for? Take a moment to reflect on that.
“Vision gives you your direction, habits give you your motion.”
All the progress and ambition in the world will not make your dreams come true if you are not aiming in the right direction. Whenever someone asks me “Can I too, be financially independent and if so, how long will it take?” All I need to know is what are your dreams and what are your daily habits? The more concrete their dream and the more that the daily habits feed the dream, the sooner they will be financially independent and can use their time to pursue what truly matters. Their future self is shaped by the present use of their checkbook and calendar.
I know people who are great at goal setting. They even break their goals down into small time-bound action steps. Yet, every New Year’s they pull out there goals and feel like failures. The simple reason is that their daily habits do not support their goals. Deadline after deadline passed and nothing was accomplished. consider when a sailor sets out to cross an ocean most of the coarse adjustments are no more than 1-degree slight changes but they are made continuously. If you just spent five minutes each morning reading over your goals and five minutes taking a small action towards them at the end of the year you would have invested 3,650 minutes toward achieving your goals.
“Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you imagine it first.”
How to Reverse Engineer Your Life
Want to know how to reverse engineer your life? Just ask an engineer. OK, since I am an engineer I will just go ahead and tell you. Start by writing your obituary. Yes, I know that sounds silly and morbid but think for a second, who better to write it than you? What do you want people to say about you when you are gone? Now is your chance to design your future.
Think for a minute, what did you do yesterday to support those life goals? If you just said “I don’t know, um nothing?” perhaps you could use that obituary to set your life goals. Perhaps you could use your life goals to set your decade, then annual, then monthly, then weekly, then daily goals. Your obituary will tell you the kind of person you want to be known as. That will tell you the kinds of things you will need to accomplish. That will tell you the vision you should set for your life.
Action Break
Write your obituary right now! Don’t worry this article will be here when you are done. Don’t waste any more time! Use the breakdown of those to plan your decade goals, then annual, then monthly then weekly, then daily goals.
“Live beneath your means so you can rise above your circumstances. Then one day you will find you have lived up to your dreams.”
– Mr. Refined
Break Down Goals into Easy Bite-Size Pieces
Today: write your obituary
Day 2: write a few dreams or scientifically speaking, life goals based on that obituary.
Day 3: write a few goals for the next decade based on your life goals.
Day 4: write a few goals for the next year based on your decade plan.
Day 5: write a few goals for the next month based on your annual plan.
Day 6: write a few goals for the next week based on your monthly plan.
Day 7: write a few goals for each day based on your plan for the next week and post them visibly, then celebrate one full week of action, you are building a new habit of taking action. Great job future millionaire!
“A dream is just a goal without a deadline. A dream without a deadline is a wish. A wish is a thought, that if acted upon, is a dream come true.”
– Mr. Refined
I don’t suggest that you need to write daily goals this week for each day of the rest of your life. This is habit building, and you need a process and a place to start. What I am recommending is that you should have daily goals for this week based on the work break down to achieve your life goals.
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
– Warren Buffet
Why I Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions
Every year around December 31, we see and hear of thousands of people making New Year’s Resolutions. Despite people’s good initiatives, we all know they usually don’t happen. I used to make New Year’s resolutions too but I never followed through with them. On January 1st I would get discouraged that I never carried out last year’s resolutions. Why not just cross out last year and write in the current year over the same old resolutions? After a while, that pattern can be draining on a person.
I went so far as to look up the statistics of success with New Year’s resolutions, it was a depressing 9% of people that achieve their New Year’s resolutions. In other words, you would have better luck opening a successful restaurant than achieving your resolutions. Huh, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe that should be your resolution? I stopped making New Year’s resolutions a few years ago in favor of sustainable goal
The Sustainable Habit of Goal Setting
Practice rolling goal setting. At the end of every day, I write out tomorrow’s goals. At the end of every week, the last goal should be to write out next week’s daily goals. At the end of every month, look at next month’s goals and break them down into written weekly goals. At the end of every year, your last annual goal should be to write out next year’s goals to hit your decade plan and so on. Recalibrate as often as needed to ensure your life goals are still valid and in alignment with your course to achieve your dreams.
In this way, you only get granular for the next manageable time period into the future, not the
Give Up Before You Commit To
Material things are weighty. Stay lean to go fast. Some things slow us down and distract us from our life goals, so you have to remain intentional and stay on course. Look back at that obituary you wrote at the beginning of this exercise. Put each line of it into one of two categories. Title the first category “Character.” Title the second category “Material Possessions.” When done! What do you notice? Is one category more full than the other? Do you spend the most time on the category that matters most to you?
It is almost time to realign, but first, we have to cover one more point. “You can do anything but not everything” – Paula Pant. You can’t do more without first doing less. Time and money are limited resources. Everything you do is a trade-off of something else you don’t do.
One of the first rules of organizing spaces, is that the item being stored needs to have a place large enough for it to be keep there. Sounds obvious I know, but how many drawers or boxes do you have in your house that are overflowing so badly that you get frustrated every time you stuff one more dohickey into that space as it falls back out or you fail to get the drawer shut? Our calendars are no different. A to-do list has no temporal or physical constraints. You do and so does your calendar. So stop using to-do lists and start using calendars. A to-do list can grow to infinite length. It should only be used to set priority on what goes into your calendar.
Track Your Time Use
I recommend mapping out your daily time by setting a reminder to ding on your phone every half hour for a day, or better yet, a week. Next, make a spreadsheet list of how you spent your time. This will be helpful in many other articles so hang on to it! For now, let’s look at it from the perspective of cutting 1-3 areas that add little or no value to your life or happiness level. You can now repurpose time to be intentional. finally, look at your goals every morning as a reminder for the day!
S.M.A.R.T Goals
Make your goals S.M.A.R.T. Set your goals based on the following guidelines:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely
Finally, do the opposite. Set 1-3 goals that are stretch goals. Let them be unrealistic. Make them something that you don’t currently have the funding, means, skill, education or network to accomplish today. Now you have a plan and as Buffet says “you can beat a genius without one.”
“Tell me what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
– Mary Oliver, American Poet, The Summer Day.
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